It’s What’s Inside That Counts

It was an idea whose time had come. Right now, in fact. The muslin bags had arrived a few hours earlier in a bit of a heap, the delivery box a dented mess. But they’d been protected from the elements at least by a thick, clear plastic bag. Shop Boy could see that the bags needed some serious ironing, but there was little time for that.

These little beige bags, about 5 inches by 8 inches when flat, with a cute little orange string tie sewn into the top seam, were to be the wrapper for a line of goods – jams, roasted peppers and such – for The Gift Wall at Artifact, a caffeine-fueled offshoot of Woodberry Kitchen. You can’t miss it … it’s right next door to the big Pepsi billboard off I-83. Now serving dinner, prix fixe, different theme every week. Unbelievable. Can’t get in to Woodberry Kitchen? Artifact is a very worthy fallback. Just go. Now. OK, finish this first. But then go.

Mary, of course, designed the paper goods for the place, using “artifacts” from a previous generation of letterpress to add an odd charm. Many of these came from “Mr. Wilhelm’s Shop.” This was the Timonium basement operation left idle, but never dusty, by the widow (Earcell Wilhelm) of an industrious hobbyist. Some years after his death, she needed to move and put the contents of the shop up for sale, everything-must-go style. We jumped at it, and what is now known as Typecast Press was born.

Strange and wonderful scraps from his life of printing have become bits of loopy eye candy on the Artifact menu and coffee-cup wrappers. Very fun.

Anyhow, Artifact sells great stuff made over at Woodberry Kitchen in small packages, like muslin bags. So Mary decided we should go ahead and print the Tuscan O that is Woodberry’s logo on each muslin bag.

We’d done similar jobs, so Shop Boy knew what this meant. The first problem is corraling the drawstring so that it doesn’t flop down into the printing area and get itself inked, thus wrecking the bag, or slip behind the printing area and cause a seam in the logo, thus … wrecking the bag. Not so bad. I simply had to brush the string to the side of the tympan as I fed each one. An elastic band I’d put over the tympan bales helped there, stopping the bags from sagging and also keeping the sticky black ink from pulling the occasional freshly printed one into the maw of the press … wrecking the bag. (Full-bleed coasters, ones inked all the way across, do that sometimes, because an elastic band can’t touch any part of its surface.)

Finally, this would require some tomfoolery with the impression lever. Sometimes you can overcome inking issues by bashing the gooey stuff into an object. And the big C&P can really bring it. But Shop Boy saves that for “last resorts.” This was merely a crisis. DEFCON 5, as it were.

Teachable moment: Many people use the whole DEFCON thing improperly, assuming that a higher numeral means a higher probability of nuclear war. Rather, think “Countdown to launch.” DEFCON 1′s actually the really, really, really bad one, if any escalation toward mutual annihilation can be called less than really, really, really bad. DEFCON 5 is a moment for deep concern and reflecting. DEFCON 1 is a moment for deep doo-doo and genuflecting.

Ahem.

Shop Boy also didn’t want to hit the bags too hard because the material is porous. You don’t want the image to “ghost” on the other side. On that note, I had to account for an unexpected layer of packing — a little sheet of acetate would need to be slipped into each bag to keep the ink from going through no matter how soft or hard I hit it. That meant cutting 25 little sheets, inserting them, printing 25 bags, pulling the sheets out, inserting them into new bags and printing 25 more. Repeat, repeat repeat.

Foo.

OK, so now came the experimenting. Another way to overcome light inking is to hit it twice, or to “trip” once to get a little extra ink on the plate and then hit it once. Sometimes it takes a little more. Here was my dance: Insert bag into guide, throw lever into trip mode for two passes, throw lever into print mode for three passes. Remove printed bag, put new one into guides, throw lever into trip mode, etc.

Now, normally Shop Boy is pretty good at counting to three. But you get the big press going and start dealing with flopping strings, wrinkles in bags, elastic bands, acetate sheets and, well, you’d better have some extras on hand. Because hitting a cloth bag three times in exactly the same spot is tricky under the best circumstances. Pull one out after only two hits and there’s just no stinking way to put it back in for the third … wrecking the bag.

You get the idea. Printing can be annoying sometimes. But you should see the bags.

In fact, go take a look at Artifact. Seriously, we’re finished here. Go.

OK, here they are:

Now go. I mean it.

King’s Ransom

Who are these clowns? And how in heck did they find me here?

Shop Boy was up to his ears in dirt and dust, on an archeological dig at Baltimore’s old Globe Poster Printing Corp. In Mary’s latest installment of “Saving the World One Grimy Corner at a Time,” we were prepping and packing Globe’s collection of amazing old stuff for a move to the Maryland Institute College of Art for its next life as a teaching collection. These were the raw materials used to create not only famed posters to advertise big-name R&B and rock music concerts but also for carnivals, burlesque, Hollywood moving pictures, car racing and, yes, Baltimore drag shows. Though “only” an adjunct professor there, Mary had somehow, um, persuaded the president and provost of MICA to purchase the truly mind-boggling collection. (This will not surprise you if you know Mary, but that’s a story for another day.)

Shop Boy was dragged kicking and screaming into the act. I mean, I was having enough trouble keeping Typecast Press in order. “Are you crazy?” But Mary needed me, so I went on that freezing winter day to Globe’s blustery, unheated Highlandtown headquarters, with a big chip attached firmly to my shoulder. Under the 17 shirts and eight jackets, of course.

While Mary and Globe owner Bob Cicero discussed strategy for keeping the collection safe and together, Shop Boy mostly was left  standing around on those Arctic ice floes that were serving as concrete floors. (Did I mention it was cold there? I should.) To keep the circulation going, I began to explore the cavernous place. For years now, most of the action had been on the other side of the plant from the composing room. Globe had been mostly screenprinting plastic “Going Out of Business” signs for others while worrying about its own future. But the composing room was where all that letterpress magic had once happened. Bob’s stories of a buzzing crew creating perhaps 20 unique posters a day there got Shop Boy to thinking of his and Mary’s trippy young days in humming newspaper composing rooms. And as they went off to chat, I tripped again.

It’s tough to describe exactly what Globe’s composing room looked like when we got there. It was just … stacks. And stacks. And dust. And stacks. You stepped over and through openings to get to other openings. Not to criticize, but it had literally been years since a person had stood, or swept, in some of those spots.

And so I found myself on a part of the floor that hadn’t been looked over in a while, at least from this prone angle. I wiped the dust off my shoulder, cursed, then sneezed. Mary called out, “You OK, Shop Boy?” I was fine. I kicked gently at the thing that had brought me down. Just a broken mop handle or something. But what was that next to it? I’d dislodged an old “cut,” an elk head that was probably part of some lodge’s logo that Globe had once printed. It was from a drawer whose bottom had let go. I hadn’t noticed the drawers before. Or the cabinet, for that matter. But there it was, so I decided to take a peek.

Well.

Turns out that in this here factory, among the stacks of lead, mountains of metal, vats of ancient fluorescent ink, reams of fabulously aged paper and rack after rack after rack after rack of hand-carved maple letters and signs were the scattered bits of mid-20th century posters for the Indianapolis Clowns, a Negro Leagues team that, when it wasn’t playing some serious baseball, by all accounts (yup, Hank Aaron is an alumnus), was barnstorming the nation with African costumes, cornball comedy and … blackface. The poster pieces had been set aside long ago once Hammerin’ Hank and the other top black stars were grudgingly accepted into Major League Baseball.

Sports? Here? Shop Boy was all in. I took everything I could carry back to our printshop for proofing on the Vandercook, then packaged them up carefully and set them aside for Bob, who remembers his late dad, Joe Cicero Sr., talking about them, though of course it had been some years back.

Then came this:

Kind of neat, am I right? That’s Eddie Feigner.

Who?

The King!

No, really. As in, The King and His Court.

The long story of how he and his poster came back to life is more amazing, but I’ll give you the quickie version so we can all get back to our own lives a bit sooner.

There are eight pieces to the poster, an advertisement for the barnstorming softball team that would go town to town and, using only four players, beat the bejeepers out of any who dared to challenge them. Shop Boy had seen the act as a kid on ABC’s Wide World of Sports.

The poster worked like many at Globe: The main image would be printed, in several colors, for a big stack of posters. Later, wood type would be used to fill in the locations, dates and times of the shows in black ink. If the client were traveling all over the East Coast, say, the wood type could be swapped in and out to create specific posters for each stop.

Well, the pieces of this particular poster had been scattered through time to the far corners of the Globe warehouse, but suddenly began turning up under here, over there, atop shelves, inside a box, wherever they should not have been. Each time, Shop Boy was waiting. OK, so my main job at Globe was to sort, alphabetize and box the metal-on-wood photo cuts of R&B, rock and hip-hop acts for their eventual further cataloging by young artist/historians at MICA. In the rush to prep the collection for the move, there wasn’t time to worry about searching for the other pieces to a forgotten poster for silly old ballplayers.

Instead, they began finding me. Swear to god.

The black plate popped up first. Shop Boy saw it sitting atop a work table. It clearly depicted a baseball stadium facade with the words “King and His Court” reversed out of it. “Hey, I wonder if this was for ‘The King and His Court,’ ” Shop Boy wondered aloud.

“What was the giveaway?” Bob joked.

The red plate, an echo of the black facade that added a few pennants and a big star with a silhouette of the King’s head, had been snapped in two somehow and ended up at opposite ends of the building. By dumb luck I happened to carry one piece past the other one day, recognized the color of the ink stain on the wood, and … what do you know? The “yellow” background plate — which I obviously prefer as baseball-field green — was mixed among a carton of auto racing poster plates. The four-man lineup cut popped out of a dusty box at the bottom of a stack filled with carnival stuff.

But The King was nowhere. So many pieces of early Globe posters (this was from 1955, as the central pennant shows) had been sawed into shelves once the job was finished or gone missing in a series of printshop relocations that I deemed him a lost cause and got back to the more important task of documenting the key R&B figures whose heads had been in cold storage for too long and bringing them back to life with a little warm ink. I’d culled about 150 heads from a collection of maybe 15,000 that I either recognized from a Globe poster or that just looked cool and different and brought them back to Typecast to proof as well.

It was the ears that caught my eyes. Not the buzzcut in the sea of very fine afros of, say, Stevie Wonder, Jimi Hendrix, James Brown, Roberta Flack and Bootsy Collins. “No way!” I picked up the little head and walked it over to the carved wooden star. The ears matched the silhouette! Yup, the King of Softball had long ago been sorted into the kings and queens of R&B. Funny.

The cartoon part of the poster, explaining the King’s act, lay at the bottom of a crate filled with ink-coated wood once used to fill out huge poster forms. A needle in a haystack.

And finally, after we’d cherry-picked all the best lead type “slugs” produced by the Ludlow, a kind of linotype machine — FUN + GAMES + RIDES and such — three huge containers got filled with the rest, to be sold as scrap. A few stray slugs had ended up on the floor, and had been pushed with a foot or whatever into a dusty corner. Don’t know why, but I dug through the pile.

Hello?

E-D-D-I-E F-E-I-G-N-E-R.

S-p-o-o-k-y.

(Also a bit eerie: This just moved on the Web while I was fact-checking myself. King and His Court to retire, like, this weekend.)

P.S.: Bob Cicero liked the story of Shop Boy putting the poster back together so much, he told me to keep the pieces.

Now, where the heck did I put them?

Kidding!

The Sign

That was odd. Shop Boy had come across the hall to scout for a background form — a type-high block (8 by 10 in this case) for printing a solid block of color — and lazily left the door open behind him. It was mid-afternoon on a Thursday, not a high-traffic time for the Fox Industries Building, and I’d only be a sec. Mary needed the block pronto for a demonstration over at her Maryland Institute College of Art letterpress class. We’d been moving everything imaginable around in the studio recently, but Shop Boy had a basic idea where such a thing might be.

Just as I pulled open a file drawer, there was a weird sound behind me. Somebody else was here. Shop Boy looked around for a heavy, blunt object just in case.

OK, every stinking thing in a letterpress studio is a blunt object capable of inflicting bodily harm. I might be dead before I could choose among potential weapons. Shop Boy summoned his courage and peeked sheepishly around the corner.

“Are you the Grim Reaper?” I asked.

OK, I asked that in my head. Mostly I just stared at the figure who’d wandered through the open door. But it was definitely what Shop Boy was thinking: My escort to the next world had arrived. She was the picture of calm, her long, white hair framing a serene, smiling face.

Shop Boy was struck dumb. I grew up on the Grim Reaper of the Monty Python sketches, the black-clad, skeletal Death with the scythe impatiently gesturing toward the salmon as the killer of all the dinner guests as the hostess quite literally dies of embarrassment.

The older woman was silent for a moment as well. Then she spoke …

“I have been coming here for years,” she said.

Gulp. Death had been stalking me. Waiting for this moment. Why this one? Was it the deli turkey?

Now, I’d always told my late mom that she wouldn’t die anytime soon, that she was too mean for a heaven-type atmosphere, that God didn’t want any part of her until she mellowed. Shop Boy figured the big fella saw me as someone who had a few issues to work through as well before I could even get a tee time at St. Peter’s Country Club, never mind pulling up a bar stool at the ultimate 19th hole. Guess you never know.

“Are you an actual museum?” she asked with a smile. “I get a shiatsu massage down the hall regularly , and I’ve never seen the museum sign before or seen the door open.”

Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. The sign next to the door. We were thinking of a demarcation for the studio, something that would be fun. Mary and Chris Hartlove came up with the words: “The Old Printers’ Home and Museum of Mostly Useless Antiquities.” Shop Boy had come up with the idea of a “right-reading” copper-on-wood printer’s plate. A normal plate would of course read backwards so as to print correctly. The plate maker, Owosso, thought it was all a cute idea, too.

“Um, hee-hee, that’s kind of a joke,” Shop Boy stammered. “Our old roommate was a photographer who used actual film, and we use these crazy old presses. You know, it’s all outmoded stuff no sane person would, uh, be caught dead using to try to make money nowadays.”

She looked around for an uncomfortable moment, turned and floated back toward the exit, as Shop Boy — still a bit shaken, honestly — realized he’d probably seemed kind of rude to his, um, guest.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was just, uh, surprised to see someone here.”

The woman grinned. Then she was gone.

Spooked, Shop Boy grabbed the background block for Mary and decided to knock off, uh, cash in, er, stop working … for the day. Not, like, forever or anything.

And I drove home very cautiously, pausing only to pay $53 for 14 gallons of gasoline, an oddly reassuring reminder that this truly ain’t heaven.

Whew.

Back in Business

Is there an echo in here? Hello? Hel-lo? Hel-hel-hel-oo-oo-oooo?

OK, I get it. This has been a big, empty space for far too long. Well, Shop Boy’s been kind of hiding out. From computers, from e-mail, from everything. Anything not directly related to the holidays and the physical production of stationery, that is. Snowed under with work — yay! — Mary’s needed me to be a mini-her, something never really required of me before. Like flying solo on the Heidelberg Windmill. Tackling tricky cuts with pricey paper on the big guillotine. Or even more daunting, mixing my own ink colors. In fact, Shop Boy’s thinking of getting a T-shirt for around the shop: “Trust me. I do this professionally.” Wouldn’t that be a funny turn in all this?

Then again, it’s the only thing Shop Boy does do professionally these days. Yep, the economy bit me. At least Mary took the news of my layoff as a journalist better than I did.

“How quick can you get to the printshop?”

And once Mary knows you’ve got some free time on your hands, well …

As one guy recently noted of Shop Boy: “You’re the busiest unemployed person I’ve ever met.”

So, that’s where I’ve been. Plenty to write about but no time to write it.

If you’ve stumbled upon this blog by mistake or have been checking in occasionally, please stop by again soon. Just a taste of what’s to come:

Press acquisitions. (Surprise!)

Back-to-school plans. (Not as you might expect.)

A Hollywood ending.

And, of course, go-go girls.

Let’s talk soon.

Permafrosted

It’s safe to say that, if they X-rayed his lungs today, Shop Boy would receive a sparkling report.

And a dark diagnosis: Freezer Burn.

I mean, the warning signs were there. That odd glistening from certain angles. The telltale gleaming smears on the dinner napkin. Shiny dandruff. Disco-ball reflections off the fingertips.

Shop Boy: “How long do I have?”

Dr. Mashburn: “Ninety-one.”

Shop Boy: “Days? Just three months!?!?”

Dr. Mashburn: “No, 91 more cards. And you’ve got about three hours.”

Shop Boy “NOOOO-ooooooooo!”

True story: Shop Boy’s always kidded Mary about her love of handmade paper. I didn’t get it, and sometimes still don’t, to be honest. The edges were all rough and ragged. The thickness was all messed up and irregular. And it was expensive as heck. One Christmas when we were dating (yes, her obsession goes back that far, way before letterpress took over our lives), Shop Boy went to the drug store, bought a ream of garishly colored construction paper, crumpled it a bit and tore it into rough, kinda-square chunks.

“To Mary: Since I know you love wrecked paper.”

Oh, we laughed about it back then. But at 3 a.m. on a Thursday night/Friday morning, it was all Shop Boy could do to keep from crying.

See, the thing about handmade paper and letterpress printing is that inconsistent thickness of sheets of paper means the impression is all messed up, some sheets printing beautifully, some barely touching the form enough to pick up ink. The best you can do is segregate like thicknesses into separate piles and change packing depth as you go to match. Annoying? Oh, you betcha. Add sprinkles, which of course Mary had, and … oh, man.

The job was a card for wedding guests letting them know that a donation to a charity had been made in their honor in celebration of the bride and groom’s big day. Nice gesture. The design included a side-by-side silhouette of the happy couple, with it and the words of the invitation to be printed in gold ink on, yes, Freezer Burn, a white, sparkly, handmade paper from Porridge in Nebraska.

Mary loves her some Porridge Papers. We’ve done magical cards for a fantastically, um, creative friend on orange paper with orange sprinkles — Shop Boy forgets what that paper shade was called. (Mary informs me over my shoulder that it was called Fuzzy Navel. Awesome!) We did a baby announcement on a bluish paper that Porridge had added a scent to, so that when recipients opened the announcement of the little darling’s arrival … they smelled a hint of baby powder. Cool, no?

“What’s with Baltimore and all this sparkle paper?” Christopher James, the proprietor of Porridge Papers, was asking Mary, having received several similar orders recently from her.

You have to remember, Baltimore is the city whose favorite nutty mayor decided that an answer to the recycling problem was to take all the glass bottles piling up, crush them, add them to road-paving materials and … glasphalt. A number of the city’s streets shine like diamonds when your headlights hit them. Swear. That’s just how we roll. Besides, when clients get a look at some of the funky stuff we’ve printed on sparkle paper, sometimes nothing else will do.

Now, what can Shop Boy say about gold ink? It’s an odd deal. First off, that’s actual gold leaf in there. Meaning it’s a bit pricey. Second, on certain papers it prints more brown than golden. Baby announcements that smell like baby powder? OK. Baby announcements that look like baby poo? Not so much.

Gold ink is also picky about how you apply it. Spread it on the ink wheel of a C&P, get it to the right density for the run and you’re off. Awesome. But say, for the sake of argument, that sprinkles get shaken loose from the paper your printing with each and every impression, creating golden blemishes wherever they land, sometimes sticking to the plate and messing up five cards before you even notice. Then you take a speck of gold from the ink plate and dab it into the crummy-looking crevices. Two very different shades of gold. That’s OK. It’ll dry back and blend in. Same ink, right?

Um, nope.

Which Shop Boy really didn’t get through his skull until 3 a.m. rolled around, he proudly picked up the pile of “finished” cards and he noticed that six hours of eye-straining, nerve-testing, absolute focus had produced … garbage. I mean, it was incredibly subtle work, using the steel tip of a long-expired pen to dip into a droplet of the gold ink and then, very carefully, tracing the contour of a nose or a chin on a cameo or adding a splash of color to a spot here and a spot there, and there and there and there and there and there and there and there.

Look at the dried card straight on? Nice. Let it catch the light? The effect? Bird doo on a statue, like from a golden eagle or something:

And the sparkles? In my nose. In my tear ducts. On my scalp. In my teeth. And, yes, in my lungs.

A big pile of wrecked paper. And a job that would have to start again, almost from scratch.

I see spots.

Stage Dive

Shop Boy may have claimed to be many things in this letterpress blog on occasion: chronicler of the absurd, poker of hypocrites (self included), lover of heavy metal as well as syrupy pop music, hater of bugs.

One thing I’ve never tried to pass myself off as … not even once … is a printer. Oh, I may offer a helpful hint now and then to a shop visitor or blog reader by mistake. But Mary’s the brains here. Really. She gives me grief when I call Typecast Press her shop. But honestly, all that we’ve accomplished as a business is her doing. How the printshop looks? OK, some of that’s me. But Mary’s the printer. She does her thing, then Shop Boy cheers … and cleans the presses. And maybe writes, ahem, a word or two about it.

Believe me, that’s how I prefer it.

So imagine my surprise — OK, horror — when Mary handed me her iPhone, displaying the ad for a recent AIGA event.

One of the featured speakers? Guess.

“They’re not making people pay for this, are they?” I asked.

They were. Shop Boy? Already paying as soon as I saw the ad.

Kat Feuerstein of Gilah Press + Design, Mary Mashburn and Shop Boy of Typecast Press and Ray Nichols of Lead Graffiti will share their love and war letterpress stories, tips and tricks and answer all your questions!

Where to hide?

“Mary Mashburn and Shop Boy.”

Ooh. Ever hear the expression “a face for radio,” meaning “too ugly for TV”? Shop Boy’s got a face — and a voice — for blogging.

Mary assured me that this would all turn out fine. That, yes, I am a printer:

Who ran the job on the windmill last weekend?

Shop Boy, but …

Who does so many of the C&P jobs and sets up demonstrations on the clamshell presses for tour groups?

Shop Boy, but …

Who empties the garbage cans, fills the solvent dispensers, changes the water jug, deals with the recycling, unfolds the boxes of envelopes (then re-folds them after they’re printed), digs out the 26″ by 40″ ream of Lettra from the absolute bottom of the stack of enormously heavy boxes then puts it back when Mary decides to use a different paper, rounds the corners on the coasters, wrestles the eyeleter to a draw, picks up lunch, makes the coffee, reminds Mary which way “clockwise” is and sings a few really bad songs really badly?

OK, Shop Boy, but …

I don’t know about the whole “Shop Boy as expert” deal.

So there we were at the Windup Space at the appointed hour, ready to give our talk. The Windup sits on Baltimore’s once-hopping North Avenue, now kind of a gloomy stretch of fried chicken places, cash-checking services, Jo-Willie’s Bank & Trust, sketchy taverns, no-tell motels and the castle/fortress that the Baltimore school system built as a symbol of its great successes with urban students. To be fair, North Avenue also has Joe Squared (awarded the 2010 Shop Boy Gold Seal for pizza) … and the Windup Space. It’s essentially a big old, hollowed-out tavern itself with an extensive show of tattoo-inspired art along one wall, a long bar along the other, a small stage and a bunch of tables. It looked like a fun place to hang out. Beer in bottles or on tap, what looked like an OK liquor assortment and a bathroom that didn’t give Shop Boy the creeps. We’re there!

Mary had prepared a slide show (as had Kat and Ray) to give the audience a feel for our shop and work, helpfully illustrating several panels on the joys and hazards of collecting — and cleaning — printing presses with doodles by Shop Boy, who has never claimed to be an artist.

Shop Boy has never tried to pass himself off as a computer whiz either, by the way. So, as the IT guys threw up their hands when the projection projector wouldn’t project the project that Mary had spent all day on, Shop Boy began pacing even more furiously. No A/V aids meant more talking. Not good.

But Mary doesn’t take “no” from any computer. So while Shop Boy sweated, she elbowed the IT guys aside and set about untangling cords. There was a wrong adapter in the mix or the pixel setting was discombobulated or whatever. (Like I said …) At last, the  guy behind the bar — who it turns out was Windup Space owner Russell de Ocampo — remembered an old Mac laptop he’d had stashed in the back room and, as old Macs will, it fired right up and saved the day. The picture wasn’t great, but our audience would get the idea. And the less they could see of Shop Boy’s doodles, the better. You, readers, are not so lucky:

Anyhow, Mary sailed through her 10-minute presentation, mixing humor with the insight, then Ray and Kat did likewise, and nary a peep out of Shop Boy (even with Kat poking me a couple of times to urge me to speak up) — they were doing so well without me. But then came the Q&A period, and Mary’s hand reaching over with the piece of paper that held the questions we were supposed to answer whether they came from the audience or not. “You do this one, Shop Boy,” she said sternly.

It was a “complete this sentence” kind of question: “You will do well at letterpress printing if you are …”

I choked on the wording until it came out something like: “What kind of person would want to do this?!?!”

Freudian slip? “You will do well at letterpress printing if you are …” CRAZY.

Then something crazy did happen. From somewhere deep within Shop Boy came a soliloquy on the art, the majesty and the magic of letterpress; how it can turn someone who isn’t a printer, isn’t an artist and isn’t a computer tech (duh!) into a creator of a tangible beauty — that blank piece of paper transformed into something lovely.

Sigh. There goes all of Shop Boy’s whining down the tubes.

Nip and Luck

The windmill certainly let’s you know where you stand. Or should stand anyway.

“Oh my god, Mary, what did you do to your finger?” Shop Boy asked after noticing the gnarly bruise, blue and purple stretching about an inch fore and aft of the knuckle of the middle finger on her right hand.

“Um, I screwed up?”

We’ve discussed how Mary loves the Heidelberg, and all its knurled knobs, dials and doohickeys. Apparently it loves her back. Enough to let her off easy.

Just this once.

The way Mary described the incident, it went kinda like this: The paper stack started getting wonky in the “out” rack and she worried the sheets might begin to slip onto the floor and get dirty or, worse, end up in the guts of the machine and have to be fished out. So she made a quick reach in from the right side of the windmill, thinking she had clearance.

She very nearly had a little extra room on her right hand. There are several moving parts on that side of the machine, and her finger got “pinched” between two of them.

Complacency. Lack of focus. Familiarity. Overconfidence.

There’s enough danger in the printshop without adding any of the above.

Mary, it seems to Shop Boy, added all four.

Next time, she might end up with exactly that many fingers.

If she’s lucky. Lesson learned.

Composite Metal

It was 10:30 on a Tuesday night, and all but a few of the Denver bars had closed up shop for the night. (Don’t get Mary started. Let’s just say that she and I often differ on the wonders of Denver … and we’ll leave it at that.) She’d picked up a copy of Westword, the local independent publication that has become a whole lot more slick since Mary and Shop Boy left town, perhaps riding a high brought on by page after page after page of ads for all of the, cough, legitimate medical marijuana dispensaries in the city.

Now, don’t you go calling them “head shops,” you sassy thing. You need a prescription to score your doobies.

Giggling aside, Shop Boy and Mary believe in the legalization of marijuana for a bunch of health reasons. It can help fight nausea in those undergoing chemo. It can help fight pain and, OK, stimulate an appetite in those who’ve been through similar medical hell. Look, if Granny’s hurting and scared, and smoking a joint would help ease her suffering, I’m buying. But it’s still a bit trippy to see ads for delicious-looking pot brownies and chocolates. Swear to god.

Here’s the kicker: Since the state law on medical marijuana passed, the taxes on the stuff have been puffing up local budgets. That will make it a bit tougher to pull the hemp out from under the law. Either way, it’s a fascinating social experiment.

So, in the midst of these pot ads, the straight and the dopey, Mary stumbled across a listing for a book-signing at the legendary Tattered Cover bookstore in Denver.

Mary: “Isn’t this that Megadeth guy?”

Shop Boy: “What, Dave Mustaine? He’s written his autobiography? That should be some story.”

Sex & drugs & drugs & drugs & drugs & drugs & sex & drugs & drugs … and rock & roll.

Shop Boy’s been a huge fan of the rock & roll part of Mustaine & Megadeth for a long time. Mary? Ooh. Shop Boy had this running joke, using words to Mary’s favorite songs and singing them like Mustaine does in “Sweating Bullets.” (Mary’s classic response: “Isn’t he a little old to be talking like the devil?”) Mustaine’s snarling version:

Hello, Me.
Meet the real Me
And my misfit’s way of life
A dark black past is my
Most valued possession
Hindsight is always 20/20
Looking back it’s still a bit fuzzy
Speak of mutually assured destruction
Nice story …
Tell It to Reader’s Digest!

Shop Boy’s:

Billie Jean is
Not my lover
She’s just a girl who
Claims that I am the one …

You get the idea.

Mary: “Too bad you missed him. He was here the 25th. Oh, wait. That’s tomorrow.”

Alas, he was scheduled to sign books at 12:30 p.m. or something (although you could line up at 6:30 a.m. if you wanted). Shop Boy and Mary’s dad, Wayne, would be in our seats at the blessed cathedral known as Coors Field for a baseball game by then. He’d planned the journey months in advance.

Mary: “I’m going to go.”

Well.

Let me tell you, I’ve whined in this space about Mary sending me to makeup stores on my own to stumble blindly (and choke on the fumes) while looking for the Kevin Aucoin mascara or the “porcelain delicate” shade of this foundation or that. Shop Boy clearly had no idea how much she appreciated my sacrifice.

She asked me to tell her again why I like Megadeth so much. Well, it’s speed metal, of course. I mean breakneck speed metal. Yet oddly melodic. Somehow it all sounds like a classical composition, not simply a song. Very tight. And, as you might have guessed, Shop Boy loves to play around with words. Ditto for old Dave here.

Mary wanted to hear a different song by Megadeth to remind her of what it sounded like. Cue the air guitar: Dun-da-da-da-dadada-naa-naaa! Shop Boy let loose on a few bars of “Almost Honest,” a slow song by Megadeth standards, but a big favorite.

I was nearly pure
When I said I loved you
You were semi-sincere
You said, “I’d bleed for you”
We were kinda candid
Now you’ve gone away
We were almost honest … almost

“Oh, I like that one,” Mary chirped.

(Who needs bars when you got this kind of entertainment handy, am I right?)

Thus Mary declared herself primed and ready to meet The Man.

And so she did. Mary and the metalheads.

To hear her tell it, she was unimpressed. At least at first. Shop Boy’s never written a book or been approached for his autograph — yet — so I can’t imagine how difficult a book tour is on a guy. But “Mr. Mustaine” had apparently woken up on the wrong side of the bed this afternoon. When one young chap offered that he’d met the rock star a while back in a show in Small Town X, suggesting that he and the guitarist were now old buddies, Mr. Mustaine snarled, “We do a lot of those events. I don’t remember you.”

Next!

A few moments later, a young mother approached, with toddler in tow, announcing that she planned to raise her child on heavy metal, and indeed rocked the child to sleep accompanied by Megadeth. That really got to the author, who took off his sunglasses — for just a second — to wipe … a tear? “F-ing kids … always get to me,” he said to no one in particular.

Now it was Mary’s turn. She’d bought the book downstairs, where a fastidious librarian type had attached a Post-it note clearly alerting Mr. Mustaine as to whom he was signing for. In this case, he was thrown.

“Who’s Steve?” he snapped.

Not the woman who stood before him, dressed prettily in a skirt and a designer black blouse. She’d removed her little green-patterned sweater so as to better color-coordinate with the jeans and black T-shirt crowd. A bicep tattoo might have helped there.

Uncowed, she told Mr. Mustaine that “Steve” was Shop Boy (a.k.a. her husband), relaying basically what I’d told her about his music and lyrics as he went about the business of applying his John Hancock to the book. Behind his dark glasses she wasn’t sure if he was listening or not. She didn’t much care. “Well, I need to shake your hand,” she said matter-of-factly, “so that I can tell him I shook Dave Mustaine’s hand.” (She said later that she wasn’t going to wash the hand so that I could shake it later and touch the master’s essence or whatever. But then she remembered all the horror stories Shop Boy’s told her about men not washing after using the bathroom, and she quickly headed off to freshen up.)

“Hey,” he called to her. She stopped and turned. “Those are good words, man. I appreciate it.”

Apparently …

Makeup counter, here I come.

Defying Description

Typecast Press, chasing off potential customers since …

Well, last weekend.

The weather was perfect as Shop Boy arrived at the studio from an errand. Mary had been inside all week scrambling to finish a couple of wedding invites and also dodging the heat, so I figured she could use a micro break on the loading dock. Somehow I talked her into it.

As we stood in the sunshine and cool breeze — in August! in Baltimore! — an unfamiliar pickup truck turned into the lot and drove behind the building. When this happens after normal workday hours or on the weekend, it usually means one of two things: hooker hook-up or illegal dumping. It’s kind of secluded back there, and there’s a dumpster for building tenants — a magnet for trash haulers looking to make their load someone else’s problem. Either way, it kind of makes Mary angry.

“Will you remember the license plate number when they come out?” she asked me.

Sure.

True story: We were visiting Mary’s mom and dad in Colorado Springs a few years back when there was a knock on the door. Wayne was out running errands, Mary was in the shower, and Mama was doing laundry, so I answered it. On the stoop was a bleeding young man who said he’d just crashed his car and wondered if he could use the phone to call his mother. What can you say?

I called Mama in and she set about nursing the wounds on his face and arms, telling me to get the young man something cold to drink — southern hospitality and all that. The young man called his mom and we figured we’d wait a few minutes with the kid, send him on his way and that was that. Good deed done.

In the meantime, Mary had dressed and come downstairs, acting all weird and stuff about the presence of a bandaged stranger in the living room. Gosh, she’s so suspicious. To be honest, in looking back at it now, he was perhaps pacing a bit, maybe sneaking looks out between the living room blinds, which might have been odd. But his brother came soon enough, dispatched by his mom when she couldn’t get away from work. And, all right, maybe, in retrospect, it was kind of funky that his brother would ask him angrily, “What have you gotten yourself into now?” and he would answer, “Let’s just get out of here.”

And that probably would have been the end of it, had Wayne Mashburn not arrived at that very moment and smelled something very fishy about the whole deal. Our quick explanation had him darting out the door to see where the brother’s car went. Oddly enough, it was still just up the street. And when Wayne saw our young accident victim duck down in the seat as a police car passed … well, Shop Boy won’t tell you what he said. But he wasn’t impressed. He noted the brother’s license plate number as it left the scene and flagged down the cop car.

Well, golly. You’d have thought Shop Boy and Mama were the criminals the way they grilled us back in the house. The cop was almost as bad.

It turned out that the kid was a fairly well-known burglar who had made the mistake of breaking into a nearby home with a dog that immediately attacked him, leaving no escape but straight through a locked glass patio door. (The kid didn’t lie … that’s a car wreck, am I right?)

“Do you mean to tell me I’ve been hopping fences and running down alleys the past half-hour looking for this guy and you’re feeding him lemonade and cookies?!?!“

Yes, Shop Boy found that a bit of a rude way of putting it, too. But the officer was sweating and breathing hard, and he’d sprained his ankle or torn his hamstring or something, so I just chalked it up to a bad mood when he became even meaner about my lack of recollection of what the young perp was wearing.

The topper was when he asked Shop Boy, for the police report, what I do for a living.

“Journalist!” he half spit. “Some journalist …”

I quickly demanded a lawyer. That was all this copper was getting out of Shop Boy.

He did manage to get a full description of the dude from Mary, and Wayne of course had the license plate for the “wheel man.” So the kid was behind bars before long. And a few weeks after the fact, Mama got a commendation from the police chief for her crime-fighting efforts, giving us all a good laugh. (Shop Boy got squat, and I’m still a little sore about that, to be honest.)

Anyhow, so rather than count on my memory to save the license plate number on this weekend’s illegal dumper/hooker hook-upper, I ran to get my phone with the camera. Mary was super suspicious, so I hurried. Really, I was gone all of 20 seconds.

And just like that, a gentleman with long, grayish hair who’d explained through his rolled-down truck window that he’d read about Typecast Press, might have even mentioned this blog, had worked in letterpress shops all over Baltimore and thought he’d come say hello …

High-tailed it out of the parking lot as though Mary’d begun unloading a shotgun at him from the loading dock. Shop Boy showed up just as he was hitting the accelerator.

He hadn’t given his name, which I guess is where the New Yorker in Mary kicked in. Still, the remorse hit immediately. “Oh, my god. That was so mean,” she said. In her suspicion, she hadn’t really bothered to listen to the guy’s explanation. All she saw was someone who shouldn’t be there. And she felt horrible, running through in her mind who it might have been. Perhaps the man who’d e-mailed her from time to time asking her to read his life story of a Baltimore printer. What was his name?

“This is why I always ask people to make appointments,” she said. “How was I supposed to know if he was legit? Put that in your blog: Please make an appointment. God, I’m so mean.”

(Sir, if you are reading this, give us a call. She doesn’t bite that often. Really.)

I rummaged my memory banks, too. And I was sure that he was the guy who’d stopped by once before while we were cleaning galley trays on the loading dock, covered with grime and sweat and not really prepared to “talk shop” with unannounced visitors. But Shop Boy did chat with him just a few minutes and told him he could read more about us at the website before saying I had to get back to cleaning.

“I think it’s the same guy, Mary. Looked just like him to me.”

“Shop Boy, that other man was African-American, with close-cropped hair.”

Oh … um … uh …

And she laughed.

And laughed.

And patted Shop Boy on his silly old head.

Well, la-dee-dah. Just give her a commendation or something.

Workin’ on the Railroad

When we look back some day at this whole letterpress thing, I think Mary and Shop Boy may very well remember the kindness and generosity of strangers most of all. Then there are the quirky, completely weird and totally amazing things we’ve stumbled upon in somebody’s basement as we’ve barged in at the worst possible time for a looksee at some heavy stuff they’re at long last ready to part with.

Sometimes it’s a sad duty. For us as well as them. The final remains of Pop’s old business stacked clumsily in the back of Shop Boy’s pickup truck. Or maybe you’re dealing with Pop himself, watching his life’s work, most of it too heavy to lift himself anymore, carted off by some guy — and a girl!

Other times … well, check this out:

Welcome to Jimmyville.

First, let Shop Boy apologize for the photography. The new iPhone’s camera is still a bit too smart for me. Anyway, this is one view of the layout of the astonishing trainscape of the latest printer whose house we invaded. It captures a Baltimore of the 1950s, all Natty Boh and Bromo Seltzer and Baltimore Colts. The detail is stunning, down to the stuff the vice squad of those times might have wanted to speak with Jim Ullrich about. Jim has got a naughty, naughty sense of humor. And endless patience, a handy defense mechanism when Curious Mary arrives on the scene. As does wife Doris, a collector of all things carousel, from paintings to actual merry-go-round horses to the ornate facing of an old amusement park ride. It’s funny how husbands and wives tend to collect very different things. It’s like Mary and Shop Boy. She collects presses. Shop Boy collects lost hours of sleep. Works out great. In Jim and Doris’s  case, she and her horses rule the upstairs; he and his trains have the run of the basement of their astonishingly tidy home.

We’d come after breakfast to look at some wood type, a lead cutter or two and whatever else was on hand letterpress-wise. Jim needed the space in his workshop to spread out a set of model fire engines he’s wiring to flash their emergency lights on cue and to cook up whatever other optical tricks pop into his mind.

You kinda had to be there to understand how cool the cemetery effect is — dancing ghouls, ghastly fog, the while nine yards (or is that six feet? hmm), but I promised more pictures for this blog and, by gum, pictures you’re gonna get.

Dude’s only been at this a a couple of years, doing most of the work on cold winter nights, and if Mary and Shop Boy would just agree to take the letterpress stuff off his hands, who knows how lavish it could become? Have I mentioned the amusement park section? With the dodge ‘em cars, haunted house and spinning octopus ride?

Yeah, it’s incredibly cool.

So the upshot is that we didn’t get around to even talking letterpress for the better part of two hours. But when we did? Sheesh. A multigraph machine! (Below — precursor to the mimeograph machine that cranked out duplicates of handouts at your junior high school. If you’re under 35, you’ve never seen either.) With lots of type. Much heavier than it looks, by the way. A cabinet for metal furniture. Brass and wood trays. A long rack of cool old cuts. And those brass solvent cans — if you’re ever looking for a birthday present for Mary, there you go. Jim had two brass solvent cans and one brass oil can. Mary asked if we could just go ahead and take the whole collection. What could Shop Boy say?

I could have said, “Are you crazy?” But I didn’t. It was a great haul. And I think Jim was pleased to send it off with us. Below is one of the cuts, catalogued and printed by intern Allison.

See, it might be tough for these veteran printer types to understand what the heck we want with their old stuff. But they’re always glad we came. First, we give them a good price. Always. Second, who doesn’t want the chance to talk about the amazing heyday of letterpress? Finally, they’re happy, as we will be surely some day, to watch neat old stuff that has sat idle for far too long go to a good, working home.

Sure beats collecting dust.

Have You Seen Me?

OK, so I’m blocked.

See, Shop Boy once was a newspaper headline writer of some renown (Mary liked them, anyway) but used to worry that the well would run dry. That I’d lose my touch some day and never write another worthwhile headline again.

I worry just as much about this blog. Will it start to bore people? Has it already gone there? Or will it, gulp, just stop altogether, the well run dry? No more words. Shop Boy is sure that you also quake at the thought.

A New York Times headline the other day on the spread of dengue fever — yikes — in Key West led me to reflect on this:

Dengue Fever?
What About It,
Key West Says

I turned to Mary at the breakfast table and said cockily, “Hey, that’s my headline.” Meaning that’s the headline I would have written for the story. I mean, had I worked for the New York Times. It’s probably for the best. Very un-Times. Shop Boy did work at Newsday, where one day’s assignment was to sum up a second failure by JFK Jr. on his bar exam: “Belly-Up on the Bar Jr.” Ooh. We watched on the news that night as Gabe Pressman of Channel 4 in New York City railed in an editorial at whatever anonymous jerk had written that headline.

And that wasn’t even one of my good ones (though it was one of the least good-natured).

Anyway, the dengue fever headline reminded me of one I wrote as a young man just to make my Middletown (N.Y.) Times Herald-Record supervisor laugh. (OK, she was cute. Sue me.) See, there was this dude who won the lottery. Two million bucks. Well, by the time taxes and everything were taken out … he went into a screaming tirade.

$2M Lotto
Winner:
Can You
Spare It?

She laughed. Hard. But local newspaper decorum demanded that I go back to the drawing board. Still, Shop Boy slowly began to bring the editors around to “my way” of headline writing.

A Flash in the Can

This was for a TH-R story about guys who (swear to god) put runners on the bottom of outhouses each year and push-race them across a frozen upstate New York lake — with a “driver” seated inside the thing.

8 Billion Times, No
S&L tycoon calls tax deal thrifty, not shifty

This was for a Newsday story about a guy who bilked $8 billion from his savings and loan (or thrift) and testified in court that he’d simply made a wise financial decision on his taxes that paid off handsomely. Asked over and over  and over again in court if he knew he was being a crook, he answered again and again and again, simply, “No. No. No. No. No. No…”

Quantum Physiques

This was atop a Baltimore Sun story about a beefcake calendar of handsome scientists. The headline was stolen the next day by the Washington Post for a movie review of Fair Game, a film starring Cindy Crawford, a tank top and … some dude. Point taken, but sheesh. Now, everybody steals headlines. There’s very little that hasn’t been written before. But the very next day?

Good Intentions Pave the Road From Hell

This one was dead on arrival for a Newsday story about constantly delayed repairs on the Brooklyn Queens Expressway. I mean, everybody knew the road was dangerously in need of repairs, and someone was always trying. But jurisdictions, politics, budgets and special interests always got in the way.

It was a play, naturally, on the expression, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions,” meaning that it’s not enough to have good intentions. Do something good — don’t just intend to do something good — or you go to hell. The boss didn’t get it.

But where was I? Oh, writer’s block. Could have fooled you, eh?

Oh, heck. It’s probably just my brain scrambling as it tries to re-create the work that went down with my old iPhone.

I (don’t deserve but) have gotten my new iPhone, which came with the promise that Shop Boy will blog more often, post regular updates on Twitter, organize and post Typecast Press photos on Flickr, launch and maintain a Friends of Typecast Facebook page and just generally wave the flag of social media for a very worthy organization. Us, naturally.

So perhaps this has just been a bit of stage fright.

We’ll know in a few days, I expect.

WK-RIP in Cincinnati

Whenever a little boy “forgets” to walk the dog, somewhere an iPhone dies.

Somewhere in this case was Shop Boy’s satchel. See, we’d ventured to Cincinnati for the celebration of the marriage of a confirmed bachelor and bachelorette. We had to see it to believe it, you know? And heck, we’d never been to Cincinnati …

So, we’d just stepped into the sun from Murray Brothers Old Time Store with a big bag full of Mary Janes, Smarties and a million other assorted candies hand-plucked from big barrels and displays filling the tidy place. Shop Boy pulled out a few sweets for the walk to nearby Fountain Square and then tucked the brown bag into the satchel, which felt a little too moist against my hip. It was warm. I figured I must have sweated it up, and didn’t think about it again. Later that night at the hotel, Mary would discover the truth. A water bottle’s cheapo lid had come loose. My pricey iPhone drowned. Just like that.

The instructions tell you right out never to get your iPhone wet. It shorts out … you’re done. They also apparently tell you, as Shop Boy learned much later, that you should never then plug a possibly moist iPhone in to charge (you know, just in case it’s not responding simply because it ran out of juice), for this cements things. Zap. Deader than dead. A tombstone, I believe Mary called it.

Here’s where the dog walking comes in. You know how when your kid wants a puppy, he or she will promise that they’ll walk the dog every time it needs to go out, then three weeks later they’re hiding in a tree fort while you are picking up dog poop with a plastic newspaper sleeve? It’s a little like promising yourself, or whoever (gulp) bought you the iPhone, that you’ll treat it with care and always remember to sync it with the main computer at home. It’s a sure bet at first, when the thing is new. Then you start going longer and longer between syncing.

Been a while, eh, Shop Boy?

Yes, yes. And I mean … I use this thing. “Impressions of a Shop Boy” exists largely because I write entries on the commuter train, on the iPhone, whether feverishly jotting down weird ideas for later posts or even writing in complete thoughts and sentences. Then I simply e-mail files to myself and bingo. Here we are.

Well.

Shop Boy had maybe six or seven blog entries nearly completed on the little iPhone notepad thingy. And they’re gone. That’s it. Forever. Time was when a young Shop Boy had a photographic memory … about 15 minutes’ worth of one, anyway. Back at the college newspaper, The Good 5 Cent Cigar, we used TRS-80 computers. Remember those old junkers. Each time you hit a period, the best next move was to hit “save.” Gosh, they were clumsy. “Trash 80s,” they were called. Shop Boy’d get careless every now and again and lose an entire story as I was finishing the last, ahem, brilliant sentence. The shock was so intense, you’d think a college kid would learn from it.

Instead, Shop Boy would swear. Like, lots. Then I’d open a new document file and immediately start typing, and word for word it would begin to come back to me. Every time. Can’t explain it. Nor can I do it anymore. Those brain cells must have gotten, um, wet.

And so now I’m back to begging Mary for a new iPhone. And promising to sync it regularly, and answer whenever she calls — man, can that woman dribble a redial button. I’ll look down and there are 15 missed calls from her, and Shop Boy’s in big trouble. And I promise that I’ll post photos, and I’ll post videos. And I’ll never, never, never let it touch liquids.

(For the record, Mary knows I didn’t do this on purpose just to get the newer model. Clearly, Shop Boy is not that clever. And I even offered to take her iPhone — same as my dead version — and let her get the newest one. So, there …)

Meanwhile, I’ve got only my work-issue BlackBerry, sort of like the TRS-80 of smartphones. (Sorry, Mac snob.)  And I’m writing blog entries on paper that I found high and dry in a secret pocket in the satchel (so that’s where my 2010 health forms went!). You should see the messy, train-jostled handwriting. Can’t decipher a third of what’s on there. Of course, maybe that’s for the best. And maybe the stuff I’d written on my iPhone wasn’t all that great either.

Guess we’ll never know.

The Compound

They say if you remember the commercial but not the product it pitches, that is not a successful commercial. Shop Boy will buy that, I guess.

See, my brain remembers only one tiny bit of a TV ad from a while back that features a young father with a tot — he’s trying to get the little one to eat something. Well, the kid decides to share, popping one of the … whatevers into the mouth of Dad, who offers a gentle “Thank you.” Shown such heartfelt appreciation, the kid begins madly stuffing Dad’s mouth.

“THANK YOU!” the father laughs, gently fending off the deluge.

A sweet moment. What the heck were they selling? No clue. But Shop Boy mimics the father’s pseudo exasperation each time Mary, say, piles one extra box atop an already unwieldy or ridiculously heavy armful or decides to “help” me by restocking the pile of paper that I’m rapidly feeding into the C&P by slipping a new batch of paper from behind me via the air space under my armpit or, yes, feeding me a bagel when we’re driving without maintaining a safe chewing distance between bites.

So, a while back, Shop Boy whined in this space about Typecast Press, an outfit that creates stationery goods for a living, never having a stinking piece of paper that I could write a phone number or paper-cutting dimension or simple reminder on. Imagine my shock and delight, then, the day Shop Boy arrived at the studio to find the leftovers of a recent paper-cutting job — scraps that were, like, 2 inches by 6.5 inches — turned into a little stack of notepads, with cardboard backing.

It turns out Mary’s interns Ellen and Allison, students from the Maryland Institute College of Art, had heard tell of Shop Boy’s plight and, finding themselves between assignments from Mary, gathered up the scraps, cut correspondingly sized cardboard, clamped the piles down in the book press, applied “padding compound” and … zing went the strings of Shop Boy’s heart.

Mary: “They did that for you, you know.”

Me: “Oh my gosh. That was so nice.”

Mary (sarcastically): “Shop Boy, Shop Boy … It’s all about Shop Boy!”

Envy is such an ugly thing. ;-)

Anyway, I thanked Ellen and Allison profusely the next time I saw them, letting them know that I’d put at least one of the pads in every single location of the shop where previously I’d pitched a little fit about not having paper handy. And how I’d grabbed a few pads for my desk at work in D.C. and how I kept one in my travel satchel — OK, man purse … nyah, nyah, nyah! — for making notes and doodling on the train and how awesomely helpful the pads had already been.

Well. A couple of nights later I arrived at the shop to meet Allison, Ellen and the newest intern, Michelle (also from MICA), who had been immediately indoctrinated into the Way of the Padding Compound. Square pads! Horizontal pads! A deluge of pads!

Once the interns had gone, Shop Boy surveyed the haul, patting the piles gleefully.

Mary: “Did you see what else they left you?’

Me: “What? Something for me?”

Mary: “If someone was going to leave you something, where’s the first place you’d look for it?”

Me (looking around quizically): “Where?”

Mary: “Oh, come on. Over here.”

There on the shelf next to the big C&P, where I keep a pad to note starting points on a run (resetting the press’ counter gets your hands oily), was a square pad with an eyeletted cover sheet, a blue-green ribbon strung between the eyelets and tied in a bow and a note in the most lovely handwriting:

Dear Shop Boy,

Please enjoy this precious notepad. Eyeletted with care.

Most Sincerely,

The Typecast Fairies

I mean, what does one even say to that?

Mary (rolling her eyes): “It’s all about Shop Boy.”

Frankly, I don’t see a problem with that. Or with notepads stacked to the ceiling.

THANK YOU!

Three Times the Charm

You could almost see the gears spinning in the little fellow’s head.

It was birthday No. 3 for Evan, the adorable-beyond-mortal-words son of friends Curt and Amanda Iseli, and he was taking it all very seriously. He called Shop Boy over and, as he perched on his pint-sized chair, feet on the seat, bottom on the arm, looked me square in the eye.

He wanted to know what Shop Boy thought about cake. Not the band. Everyone knows my weakness there too well. Evan had reached some existential passage in his young life and was apparently seeking a spiritual guide to get him through the portal to a deeper understanding of the chocolaty deliciousness.

And then he tipped over.

That quickly, a lesson in gravity superseded the quest for baked-goods enlightenment as Curt picked Evan up and dusted him off — no tears, the little dude playing it off like a 10-year-old or something, a swig of lemonade taking his mind off the whole incident. Meanwhile,  Shop Boy used the opportunity to grab a honking turkey burger from Curt’s grill. Thank goodness for vegetarians with absolutely no clue about meat portions. Yum.

Typecast had done the invite for the party for the third year in a row, with Amanda Iseli doing the extravagant design. She does great work for Baltimore magazine, but saves a little of the good stuff for Evan’s birthday parties. Boxes, seed packets, goodie bags, cards inside of cards. Wow. All we then have to do is figure out how to apply ink to all these weird things.

For No. 3, the main invite is cut from this crazy, thick cardboard stuff Mary bought in bulk — you think the turkey burgers were bigger than absolutely necessary? — the gargantuan, heavy pile of which we’ve been whittling away at. Anyway, a little blue ink on there with the right design and … it looks just like the printing on an egg carton. Fun!

Well, this year, Evan is apparently old enough that he got a vote on the card design. So the Iselis stopped by the Typecast Press studios, where, as Shop Boy fed menus to the big C&P, Evan became fixated on the machine’s old gears. And somehow, as the guy who made all those gears move at once, Shop Boy suddenly acquired rock star status. (It’s fleeting. They all grow up.)

I suppose it’d have been more stunning had the little boy not been mesmerized by the machine, as he’s third-generation gearhead. Hot rods, that is.

Mary: “What are those three big rusty motor things in the garage?”

Curt: “Oh! Those are [gearhead-speak] flathead motors that I picked up from a guy. I bought one, and ended up hauling all three back here. I hope to trade them for [gearhead-speak] and [gearhead-speak] with [gearhead-speak].”

Um-hmm.

Evan’s not quite there yet. His pick for the coolest car in the Typecast Press parking lot? Mary’s crummy, old, dented Volvo.

Shop Boy about fell over backwards.

Presidential Zeal

Mary has worked with “names” before. In fact, as part of her career as a graphic designer, she built a niche doing clever, off-beat or even wacky invites for congressional political fundraisers. The idea was that these invitations would not be lost in the pile of formal or prissy requests that came through a potential donor’s mail slot. They were fun to do — from a gaudy coffee mug and invite for John Glenn’s presidential debt retirement party to an awesome keyboard poster (still one of Shop Boy’s favorites) and invite for Al Gore’s event with musician Herbie Hancock. Heck, President Clinton once gave a big speech in front of a gargantuan logo that Mary designed.

But, please … this is Michelle Obama we’re talking about. The Big
Time.

Put the first lady’s name on anything Typecast Press is printing and Mary’s going to freak out.

It goes deeper than politics. Is Mary excited that the Obamas are in the White House? Yes, of course. I mean, it’s undeniably cool that today in these United States, we all can officially believe that any son or daughter of America can be anything he or she pleases.

Even a letterpress printer.

So, a potential client calls Mary, saying she has designed an invitation for an arts event at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., that the Obamas are hosting. Would Mary care to bid on the project?

Are you kidding?

Foldover card with a mod, interwoven pattern — red, pink, white — full program in three colors on the inside. Really cool, but brutal registration. Red envelopes with a detail of the interwoven pattern across the bottom and a Kennedy Center address line on the flap, both to be printed in one pass with intense black ink.

My part of these more complex projects is always easy, comparatively. All Shop Boy has to do is perfect the hand-feed on a thousand or so black-on-red envelopes for the event, then make sure all of our regular — but no less important, mind you — printing assignments are finished and packaged so Mary can focus on really nailing the guts of the job. It’s what I do. Shop Boy’s the donkey; Mary’s the thoroughbred. And I am not ashamed of this in the least. The  donkey is always funnier (and can sing 100 times better, by  the way)  than the thoroughbred. Did I mention “less high-strung”?

I could, but I won’t.

Because then Mary would just bring up the “more stubborn” thing.

Hmmph.

Anyway, this is how Mary spent the days — and nights — of her birthday week. We both sacrificed our birthdays to the gods of letterpress this year. We’ll celebrate twice next time. And I was really excited about the project, which Mary was hustling to deliver on the client’s timetable.

Shop Boy’s timetable?

Shop Boy was cleaning ink off the big C&P after running a few hundred Woodberry Kitchen menus and, in a moment of wishful thinking, assumed that the “woosh-woosh-woosh” sound from the Heidelberg Windmill meant that Mary — satisfied that she’d nailed the ink color and plate registration for the next day’s run — was cleaning it, too, so that we could head out.

Au contraire. She was cleaning it, all right. But just so that she could erase an unacceptable shade of pink to make room for a fresh try on the press. She’d need to mix the new color from scratch, as the other pink wasn’t close enough to goose toward the right shade. For  the uninitiated, this meant 90 more minutes at the shop, minimum. It was already very late. My heart sank.

She was on a roll, she said, and wanted to keep going, though whiffing on a color she’d usually nail with ease was, to Shop Boy’s way of thinking, a very bad sign that she, too, needed some sleep.

So I questioned the wisdom of such a decision.

Now, who knows if Barack Obama has ever tried to use the presidential veto with Michelle, but I’m thinking it would work about as well as Shop Boy’s did that night.

Two Double Goose Eggs

Turnstiles at department stores are incredibly stupid and annoying. But they must serve some purpose, right? So each and every time I have to walk through one — they’re becoming more rare, thank heavens — I’ll stop suddenly on the other side and excitedly look toward the ceiling for what will surely be a shower of colorful balloons and confetti as the winner of the “1 Millionth Customer Award.”

The balloons have never come. Just a shower of eye-rolling from Mary.

What, you’ve never done this? How are you supposed to ever become the Millionth Customer without showing that you’re willing to act like a fool if it ever happens. It’s like the lottery. Nothing angers the Lottery Gods more than someone who would act in a reasonably sane manner if they won. It’s like Mary’s mom, also Mary Mashburn, or the “real” Mary Mashburn if you prefer. She buys her tickets semi-regularly for “the big one,” and always talks about how she’d set aside a portion of her winnings “for the children,” meaning the needy and worthy kids of Colorado Springs, Colo., and elsewhere. She’d even give us some.

Nope. You lose.

Instead, Mary II suggests, as you purchase your ticket, you should let it be known that, with your winnings, you’d quit your job, buy a Winnebago, drive to Disney World and blow the whole enchilada in seven months of drinking, debauchery, and dumb investments in your quack cousin’s miracle exercise machine.

That’s who wins, right?

Anyway, a couple of things brought this to mind. First, we were asked to bid on a business’ promo card. Really cool-looking thing with, like, 10 or 15 tiny squares to be die cut out of it.

Yup, little square confetti. Absolutely everywhere. Heck, it might even be falling from the printshop’s ceiling for a while afterward. Guess who wins the right to clean up the mess for, like, the millionth time. Shop Boy!

Still, I really hope we get the job.

Second, and of course far, far more importantly, we’ve reached another milestone here in Shop Boy’s navel: Post No. 200. Release the balloons!

Um, hell-oooo!

Hmmph. Shop Boy’s gotta get himself that company Winnebago.

Seriously, I’ve been thinking about this milestone for months. Shop Boy’s kinda proud to have kept up what I hope has been a usually fun if rarely actually useful blog. So it took almost four years, gulp, to get here. Mom would have been appalled at that. See, she was not a voracious reader. She was insane.

And she wanted me to be a writer, figuring she’d raised a kid who should be able to write at least as quickly as she read. Those moms …

True story: Shop Boy once entered a novel-writing contest for a seminar put together by Mary’s mom, who for years was (and ever shall be to many) the face of an awesome Colorado Springs arts endeavor, the Imagination Celebration. The contest deal was to write three chapters, then have sort of an outline for how the story would go from there.

So, townspeople driven zombie, bat-guano mad one morning when the coffeeshop doesn’t open. Owner’s been murdered near the hydroelectric plant. This leads to violence in the streets. What’s wrong with them? Nutty twist; can’t tell you about that. (But a New York Times article six months later kinda backed the science of my loopy supposition. ;-) ) Oh, and there’s a dopey sidekick — surprise! — who ends up stumbling upon the answer. How? Darned if I know. That part’s not written yet.

What did the three judges think? Two liked it (one of them a lot). The third?

“This makes no sense. Who drinks a cappuccino in the morning?”

Um, dude? Go to Starbucks much? But fine, not everybody’s going to be a fan of the linguistic stylings of Shop Boy.

What did Mom think? “But where’s the rest?”

That’s it. Ouch.

This blog is the product of years of writer’s therapy.

Kidding. Still, I always tell Mary, “Please, when you’re bored or whatever with this whole Impressions of a Shop Boy thing, let me know.” Because if she’s bored, the townsfolk of Shop Boy Land are close to taking up torches and pitchforks.

I’d like to think I still might have a surprise or two for you up the sleeve of my black lab coat with the monkey emblem. But who knows?

One of my favorite expressions comes from snarky old TV tongue wagger Keith Olbermann’s SportsCenter years. Forced to read a line reporting that injured player X was listed as “day to day,” K.O. ad-libbed, “We’re all day to day.”

So on we go, eh? It’s funny. In the same four years it’s taken me to get to this point as Shop Boy, Mary’s turned herself into a darned good printer. I hope writing this blog has helped her there somehow, if only to lighten the mood in tough times. If so, I’m doubly proud.

And one day, perhaps I’ll read all 200-whatever posts that end up here myself and think …

“This makes no sense.”

But I hope not.

Crying Over Spilled …

We try. At Typecast Press, Mary and Shop Boy use as responsible and earth-friendly a solvent as we can find to clean the press rollers and the ink plates. If the color is caked on after a long run, we use corn oil to loosen the ink first, then wipe on just a little solvent to finish.

As I mentioned last time, we use paper that’s at least partially recycled when we can. That’s when we don’t use cotton paper, perhaps the least planet-wrecking stuff on the globe. Every so often, we haul the cotton paper scraps over to the Maryland Institute College of Art’s paper makers.

Are we perfect? Heck, no. But we feel like, if everybody does their little part, even picking up one wrapper from the street, say, and dropping it into a trash can, we can keep the world a bit cleaner. They taught little Shop Boy that at Daniel D. Waterman Elementary School. And that offending wrapper? Probably blown out of somebody’s hands, racing away in the wind, no way to catch up to it. Happens to us all.

Oh, to still be young and naive.

Want to know what bugs the bejeepers out of Shop Boy? People in Baltimore who stop on a tree-lined neighborhood street, open a car door, set a McDonald’s bag full of trash down or dump out an ashtray full of cigarette butts, then motor onward. I could scream, “Hey, get back here!” But I don’t.

Mostly, I’m just shocked into silent resignation. And I go pick up the mess. Mary does the same thing, only she then proceeds to spend the next 45 minutes doing a trash sweep of the whole block.

So it’s hard for Shop Boy to put into words how numb and helpless it feels to read about and watch the news on this oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Yes, I’m always intrigued by the possibility for innovation that accompanies such previously unimaginable disasters. Closet science geek. But … dear god.

Many younger Americans have probably never heard of Joseph Hazelwood, the Exxon Valdez or Alaska’s Prince William Sound, still contaminated 20-plus years later from an oil spill much smaller than this one. That one happened in the middle of nowhere. This one is right at the nation’s doorstep. Could it take 30-plus years to clean up? Longer? Can we ever really convince ourselves that more offshore drilling is the answer? That drilling on Arctic wildlife refuges is OK?

No. We are wrecking our planet through our lust for oil.

Look, Shop Boy’s no tree-hugger. (Well, mostly not, anyway.) I drive a small pickup truck with a stick shift, gently enough that it gets about 30 mpg highway/25 mpg city. Mary? Her Volvo, driven — ahem — a bit less gently, is probably 20/18. Just two more American consumers of gasoline. And Shop Boy feels the oil on his hands, along with the blood of all those the dead and dying animals along the Gulf of Mexico.

Like the other day, when I noticed Mary’s tank was on “E” again, and drove over to the gas station nearest the printshop. Among its many flaws, Mary’s jalopy has a deal where, if you fill the tank beyond, say, 12 gallons, the smell of gasoline fills the trunk and begins to seep into the main cabin. Hence, “E” — again. But she loves the stupid car.

So, Shop Boy watched intently as the spinning gallon counter neared the magic cutoff, reholstered the pump handle, grabbed my receipt and … saw the logo on the gas pump.

BP. I had never noticed it before. It was just the gas station.

Suddenly it felt as though I might as well have been pouring the gasoline directly onto the ground.

I mean, why do we even try when the richest companies in the world can distance themselves from their catastrophic messes? Why pick up after slobs so callous that they can’t be bothered to simply hold the Dunkin’ Donuts refuse in the car until they come to a trash can?  (What are the public schools teaching these days?) Why go through the annoyance of properly discarding that old microwave oven rather than, say, throwing it over the fence that backs onto the railroad tracks?

Because it’s right. And because if there is a God, He’s gonna want to chat about that Big Gulp you left in the middle of His street.

Just saying.

A Little Off the Top

Paper is difficult to ship. There’s no getting around that. It bruises easy. Get careless and drop a box of, say, 26- by 40-inch paper on its corner and you might ruin four square inches of every stinking sheet in the stack. That’s wasteful, expensive and, most importantly, it really bums Shop Boy out.

And that’s a darn shame.

See, Mary — and most professional printers, I’m guessing — can do the basic geometry with a calculator and a ruler on how to best cut around the damage for the least amount waste. So could Shop Boy, I imagine, if I wanted to.

I do not.

Nope. Shop Boy wants to slide the sheets from the big box onto our trusty little cart, wheel them over to the cutter, set the guide and chop away.

Which is why the new brand of menu paper that we’re using for Woodberry Kitchen has been making me smile. Mary found it online while looking for ways to bring the per-unit cost of the menus way down, for the restaurant and for Typecast Press. And it is cheaper. Bonus points: Better for the environment, as it is 100 percent post-consumer. Double bonus points: It shows up in pristine condition. The name of the paper? Shop Boy’s secret, lest someone grab it all and force us back to the old brand.

Anyway, maybe this stuff is sturdier. Or maybe the manufacturer packs it a little better. Or maybe the new delivery guy — Derrick, Mary informs me dreamily — has simply learned how to better deliver paper than most.

Me? I’m not asking questions.

I’m not doing the math.

I’m cutting.

I’m also jinxing it, of course. Let’s all knock on wood pulp.

Conk on the Head

Now, this had to be the left-hander’s coup de grace. Shop Boy was driving 75 kilometers per hour on the left side of a two-lane road.

Of course, it was a foreign country, and that’s what the locals do, but still. There are anywhere from six to eight rotaries, or roundabouts if you prefer, on the way from the airport in Grand Cayman to the road we needed to find for the East End of the island. Negotiating those bad boys is like driving upside down. So you’ll have to forgive Shop Boy’s inexactness on the number. I lost count in all the screaming.

Sweating it? Oh, you betcha. But I’d been doing that since the morning before. See, we were supposed to be lounging on the beach already but had, ahem, missed the last U.S. Airways flight of the day out of Baltimore that would have reached Charlotte in time for the connecting flight. This being the off-season for Grand Cayman, there are only a couple of flights per day.

You should have seen us on that sad ride home from the airport. It’s the kind of harsh lesson and crushing disappointment that’ll make you straighten up and fly right. No more of this last-second race to the check-in counter for us. The lady who’d scolded us for, like, 15 minutes gave us a final warning:

Our only option was a flight that left at 5:45 a.m. the next day. Airport check-in and security opened at 3:45 a.m. Be waiting at the door.

Don’t have to tell Shop Boy twice. The fear of god — or, more precisely, my sister Margaret — was firmly installed. If I wasn’t waiting at that door at 3:30 a.m., we’d mess up the wedding and create another of those moments that you spend the rest of your life trying to live down. Nope, 3:30 was gonna find me on the airport sidewalk, nose pressed against the window, passport out of its sleeve and driver’s license in my hand, boarding pass ready for inspection, chewing gum for the trip — orange for Mary, peppermint for Shop Boy — packed neatly into the carry-on, laptop out of its case, shoes off and wristwatch stowed away, cellphone in “airport” mode and pants sagging with my belt already rolled up and stuck inside my left shoe.

Mary? She immediately rushed to the alarm clock and set it …

For 3:30 a.m.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

“Oh, relax, Shop Boy,” Mary said. “She was just being an officious jerk. We’ll be there by 4:30 for a 5:45 flight, and we’ll be fine. We’re already packed, right? Trust me. “

I did. Who I didn’t trust was me. We’d absolutely killed ourselves at the printshop to get ahead on things so that we’d be ready and guilt-free for the trip. Mary’d been up really late for several nights in a row and Shop Boy, a notoriously twitchy sleeper, hadn’t done himself any favors the past few weeks either. Look, Shop Boy’s an absolute freak about being early for the morning train to D.C. If I’m half a minute late leaving the house, the panic sets in. Mary can’t even watch anymore. And yet twice in the last couple of weeks I’ve slept through the alarm(s) and had to gallop in my wrinkled shirt and mismatched socks for the train, barely making it aboard. OK, Shop Boy … point taken.

Anyway, Mary gave a little, Shop Boy gave a little, and we got to the airport early enough that Mary could purchase every single magazine with Michelle Obama or Sarah Jessica Parker on the cover. There were about 30.

And six hours later, the pilot announced that we were beginning our descent into Owen Roberts International Airport, a quaint (gulp) little place. But the airplane’s brakes held, and soon Owen Roberts employees were wheeling the stairs — cool! — up to the plane.

Did I say cool? It’s off-season down there for a reason: It’s hot. The tarmac was a blast furnace. Still, as we descended the stairs, our arrival felt a bit … presidential. Our suitcase awaited us. And once the customs agent stamped our passports — cool! — we were dashing off to the car rental place, having gained an hour through some unexplained international time difference. Shop Boy was not asking questions. We still had to drive across the island to the Reef resort for a late-afternoon wedding. My life was on the line, or so it felt.

Mary had explained the whole driving-on-the-wrong-side-of-the-road deal during the flight. I hadn’t thought to ask before then. Not that Shop Boy should have been surprised. She makes me do
everything left-handed in the printshop, because she is a lefty and this right-handed letterpress stuff is so old-fashioned and, dare we say it — yes, she does — discriminatory. So how awesome was this?

We’d reserved a sub-subcompact car (“Chery QQ or equivalent”), but the place gave us a free upgrade to “teensie-weensie.” Which was nice, because in researching the Chinese-made Chery QQ, Mary had seen it described as a knockoff of a Chevrolet model, but with none of those annoying safety features that Americans insist upon. You know, the idea of coming through a fender bender without massive head trauma and all that. Drivers are a dime a billion in China, apparently.

After a bit of confusion over Shop Boy’s credit card — we’d forgotten to activate it, oops — and a few scowls from the vacationers queued up behind us in the heat, we loaded up our little green clown car, pointed in a direction that felt to Mary like east (I don’t even guess anymore) and off we scooted.

First roundabout: Whooooo-aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!

Second roundabout: Look out! … Whew!

“I’m so glad you’re driving,” Mary said as we dodged an impatient islander in the third roundabout.

“I’m so glad you’re navigating,” Shop Boy responded.

And we laughed. Teamwork. This was more like it, shaping up to be just another wacky adventure in the Mary and Shop Boy Show.

This Grand Cayman place is pretty cool. Everywhere is low to the water (hate to be here in a hurricane), it’s about an hour and15 minutes by car — even Chery QQ, I’m guessing — all the way around. All these weird, beautiful plants and odd animals like the wild roosters, the jet-black birds with the sideways tails and the little lizards who rushed up to check us out when we stopped at a public beach. Iguanas, by the way, make for pretty disturbing roadkill. First of all, the two we saw were the size of speed bumps. How could you not see these dinosaur-looking monsters in the road and stop in time? The darn things could total a Chery QQ. And it’s not like they’re dashing out into the road. They are lumbering beasts. Yes, one of them was killed in a roundabout, so maybe it was a “him or me” thing. Still, sad.

We finally reached the Reef at about 3 p.m., were greeted by the incredibly friendly staff, handed a cup of rum punch and sent to our room, which had a balcony overlooking the beach. We quickly surveyed the place, found it clean, slipped into bathing attire, locked up our passports in the room’s safe (a wise choice, we’re told) and went to find Shop Boy’s family. Only a few had made the trip — Dad, sister Rosemary and, of course, Margaret — but since a misunderstanding over our predicament the day before had led to a curt exchange of text messages (my bad), Shop Boy had some groveling to do.

Mission accomplished — we all chuckled it off — Mary and Shop Boy set off for the sand and the ocean for a little chilling before the wedding. If you haven’t been, the sand isn’t like the stuff we see in the United States but more like billions of tiny pebbles bashed into grains by the tide against the coral and volcanic rock. We’ve not been to Bermuda, but you can see traces of the pink that its sand is famous for on Grand Cayman’s beaches. Cool.

We finished our rum punches, dipped our toes once last time and went in to dress for the big event. Shop Boy was casual — the wedding’s theme — in khaki pants and a really boss shirt from Acapulco that Mary’s cousin Mollie had given me. It had been a favorite of her husband, so it meant a lot to me to get to wear it. Mary looked really great in a beachy sundress, her windblown hair a shade wilder and even more awesome than usual. (She kids that little girls are always so drawn to her because she reminds them of a tall muppet.) And off we went.

Two rows of chairs were set up on the beach, and the island minister stood beneath a lovely arch, back to the ocean, to do the honors.

Vinny and Natasha were, unsurprisingly, a beautiful bride and groom. And, as the sun began to set, they were suddenly a beautiful wife and husband.

Now, where do they keep the food around this place? While the bridal party took to the dock for photos (Mary and Shop Boy were in the first family shots, then became just a couple of hungry guests), we began grazing. Chicken satay. Beef kebabs. Conch. Just the beginning of a fun and delicious reception pool- and oceanside. Shop Boy and Mary relaxed.

We’d made it, by trusting ourselves and our teamwork to get us there even after the missed-plane fiasco. It’s a bit Two Stooges sometimes. Mary knows Shop Boy’s worst, but doesn’t play to that. I freak out over my own weaknesses, but know that Mary’s strengths play to mine, and mine (mostly) to hers. Weddings of other people tend to shine some sort of light on your own marriage. You forget, if you’re lucky, that wedding-day feeling of “gosh, I hope this works, because it really seems right.”

Shop Boy has.

Here’s hoping Vinny and Natasha have before the honeymoon’s over.

***

By the way, I called the delicious shellfish “conch” and was politely corrected by the local server.

He pronounced it “conk.” They ought to know, I guess. It’d be “cawnch” or something in Baltimore, so there you go.

You learn something new everyday. And by relaxing and having faith no matter what goes wrong, you learn a little about yourself. Some days you learn lots. This was one.

Driving on the wrong side of the road?

Cool!

Hero Complex

Grand Cayman is a little speck below Cuba on the world map. Shop Boy knows nothing about the island, but they tell me it’s paradise.

My nephew Vinny I do know a few things about, which is why we’re headed to the tropical island this weekend. He’s a fine young man who met his bride-to-be Natasha, a fine young woman, at Virginia Military Institute. Say what you will about the practice of war and the existence of military schools, but VMI turned out a couple of good ones here. And Vinny introduced me to the movie Happy Gilmore. You owe somebody like that, am I right?

“Wedding invitations? Our gift to you. Destination wedding, huh? Where, you say? Sounds expensive. Um, OK, we’ll be there.”

And Shop Boy knew right then what would happen next. The time and space continuum becomes  a funnel, grabbing the responsibilities and realities of life, the deadlines and the drama, which begin pouring slowly, inexorably down toward the little circle over the departure date.

Translation: We’re scrambling. Again.

Mary’s got a couple of big, tweaky projects closing this week even as  new ones launch, with bids to be written, paper and ink to order,  interns to organize, postmortem reports on her MICA class to file,  phone calls and e-mails to handle … Oh, and as we were driving to  the Shop the other morning, smoke began billowing from under the hood  of Mary’s car as the air conditioner (we think) burned up. So she’s  got a ton on her mind.

Shop Boy’s mind? One thing (roughly maximum capacity):

Yes, menus. Millions and millions of them. OK, thousands. Just like us to pick the best and most popular restaurant in Baltimore as a client.

More exactly, it’s just like us to get so busy printing menus for the
best and most popular restaurant in Charm City that there’s been no time to learn the machine that could do them for us.

And the busier Woodberry Kitchen gets, the more menus it needs. And with so much flying around behind the scenes there, they sometimes forget to tell us that they’re low on — or out of — menus till they begin prepping for that night’s rush.

Which is kind of, um, all right by me. I mean, what guy wouldn’t want to arrive at Woodberry Kitchen to the cheers of the very lovely managers Lucie and Nancy? “Shop Boy! You saved us!”

Shop Boy (in a superhero voice): “Heh-heh. All in a day’s work. To Infinity and be-OUCH!”

That sound you just heard was the slap of Mary’s open hand on the back of my head. Ahem.

So, anyway, with us leaving the country for a few days, well, let’s just say that once the new paper order arrives, Shop Boy had better find his inner hero, because a mighty, mighty high stack of menus is going to have to be produced to hold the restaurant until we return. I’ll be seeing menus in my dreams.

Then again, there might not be time for sleep.

Spice Girl

The scritch-scratch noise was coming from behind the door to the
storage closet. Shop Boy had just arrived at the studio after a hair
appointment to find Mary not around.

There it was again, louder.

Behind that door were either some serious, box-moving mice — in which case, Shop Boy was gone — or somebody was in there.

“Mary?” I called through the door. “Mary?” No response.

It was early in the semester, and Shop Boy had forgotten that intern season had begun. Then it struck me.

“Hey, Shop Boy,” Mary chirped as she entered at last from the other space. “What’s wrong?”

“Mary, why did you lock the intern in the closet?”

“Oh, she likes it in there.”

True story: Our Baltimore neighborhood has this thing for history. You know, linotype inventor Otto Mergenthaler — gulp — lived around the corner from us. Famed writer F. Scott Fitzgerald — holy-moly — spent a while a few doors down from him.

Well, each rowhouse that has had somebody famous living there at one point or another has this blue metal disc announcing same.

Wonder if they’ll let Typecast Press steal the idea:

“Winter/spring 2010 — Sabrina’s Closet.”

Sabrina, for the record, is a former student in Mary’s class at the Maryland Institute College of Art who apparently fell in love with our printshop during a tour and … wandered too close and was
sucked into the letterpress vortex. Since then, she’s seen very little of the outside world. Willingly. Swear to god.

“Um, do you guys mind if I live here during Spring Break?”

She about did. They’d better check the ventilation system over there at MICA’s Dolphin Press, because something’s wrong with these kids. Or maybe it’s the sinus-rearranging 15 pounds of lavendar and ginger that also call the closet home. Whew!

Seriously, Sabrina is a bright, funny and incredibly talented graphic design major from Cleveland, typically resplendent in huge pink, Spice Girls-playing earphones (why she couldn’t hear me through the door), who has singlehandedly organized Typecast Press’s paper, envelopes, boxes and samples into something Mary and Shop Boy never thought we’d see in our lifetimes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, the interns always get the grunt work, but this one’s taken the task by choice.

“Who did that?” Shop Boy asked Mary one day as he spied the barrister bookcases, their random piles of Typecast samples, orphan envelopes, scrap paper and other ephemera replaced by a bunch of those acid-free archival storage boxes, hand-stenciled with the letters of the alphabet.

“I even inventoried them, Shop Boy!” Sabrina beamed, holding up a sheet of paper listing the contents of each lettered box. “I knew you’d notice.”

Shop Boy would be remiss here not to mention that our other current interns, Allison and Nicolette — also from MICA — have likewise been a huge help to Typecast Press, from lining envelopes to cleaning and proofing the crazy pile of old printer’s cuts that we’ve collected to reworking our business card. More on all that later.

Meanwhile, based on sheer number of hours dedicated to the care and feeding of our little printshop, we’re making this “Sabrina Day.”

(She would probably tell you herself that every day should be Sabrina Day.)

Anyway, Sabrina’s internship is up soon as she heads toward her senior year and then on to make a name for herself as an artist and designer in the real world. But we’ll miss her. And she’ll always have a place here at Typecast Press.

And I don’t mean in the closet, arranging stuff.

Well, unless she really wants to.

Tasting Flights

In a room full of VIPs — OK, two of them anyway — Mary was a rock star. It was beautiful.

She had gotten a call a few weeks earlier from Heidi, wife of Vincent I. Pullara Jr., about creating an invitation for the third-generation Baltimore printer’s surprise birthday party. No pressure there: designing and printing an invitation sure to be scrutinized by a family of printers. And her … a “girl printer,” of all things. Well, Mary adores Heidi and Vince, and would absolutely leave Shop Boy in a second for Vincent I. Pullara Sr., so she was in.

The event was to be held at a local Maryland winery, Boordy, and so Mary designed a wine bottle-themed invite with funny descriptions of the fictional wine … and of course, the real Vince … on the label: “Bold, assertive Italian flavor; sharp on the tongue, with a witty finish.” Vintage.

Two-color job. Burgundy and a silver-gold blend. No sweat. We’d been tweaking and tweaking the platen of the big Chandler and Price in recent weeks and had at long last finally gotten the printing press’ impression about as perfect as that of an old, worn machine can be. A couple of times through the  C&P on nice, soft cotton paper.

“Hey, that looks awesome,” Shop Boy said of the first pass. “It’s really gonna be cool.”

“Are you sure?” Mary asked. “This has to be awesome. A whole huge family of printers is going to get it.”

She was realizing the enormity of her assignment, and watching the clock tick.

“Don’t worry, you’re nailing it,” Shop Boy answered.

Mary sweated it all the way up until Heidi arrived for the invites. Heidi looked over the wording once more — Mary was at least not worried about that part, since VIP Jr.’s mom Betty had signed off — said she loved the invitation, hugged Mary and went off to begin addressing. Then Mary sweated some more.

Mary: “Do you think she liked them?”

Shop Boy: “Well, she did say she absolutely loved them, so that’s a pretty good sign.”

Mary: “Maybe she was just saying that because she didn’t want to hurt my feelings.”

Oh, boy.

Well, the big day finally arrived, with Shop Boy about having to forklift Mary into the car. You can’t be late for a surprise party. And we were totally on Mary Standard Time.

I should explain Mary Standard Time. See, this is where you make all your calculations based upon how, if every single little detail works out in its absolute best-case scenario, and if the shoe doesn’t have a bad buckle (requiring a change in every article of clothing and a different handbag), and we make every traffic light, and if that stupid Hybrid in front of us on the one-lane road hits the gas,” we can make it to (event name here) almost on time.

We were due at Boordy at 6 p.m.

At 5:58, we were still a mile or two down the road, Mary shouting “duck down!” every time any vehicle that could possibly be carrying the birthday boy came into view.

“Um, I’m driving, Mary. You know,” I added helpfully, “people who are on time don’t need to duck down.”

At 6:03, we slid into place on the grassy parking lot and started running across the field toward the tasting room.

“You know,” I said helpfully mid-dash, “people who are on time don’t need to run.”

Mary’s response will remain between the two of us. You’ll thank me.

I like to joke sometimes that when we have left this earth, our friends and loved ones won’t need to refer to us as “the late Mary Mashburn and Shop Boy,” as that would be redundant.

Anyway … in we strode, looking for places to hide should VIP Jr. be right behind us. Heidi is a very nice person, but she’d have killed us on the spot if we blew the surprise. Lucky again. We made it. And when another couple slipped in at 6:08, Mary said, “See, Shop Boy? We had plenty of time.”

Seriously.

VIP Jr. arrived to much applause and laughter soon afterward, and it was time for a glass of wine and mingling. Mary naturally made a beeline for VIP Sr. This girl and her old-school printers, I’m telling you.

He greeted her warmly and, after, shaking my hand firmly, offered Mary the highest possible compliment on her invitation that could come from a printing lifer:

“I couldn’t find anything wrong with it.”

Honestly, all the other old printers in the room couldn’t quite believe Mary had done the thing. One by one, VIP Sr. paraded them over to our table to meet the person responsible for what everyone clearly agreed was a totally boss invite.

“You did this?” one guy asked, looking her over.

“Not only that,” VIP Sr. said with a grin, “she did the design, too. I never did that. Well, maybe she got a little help from [Shop Boy].”

“Nope,” I chimed in, “I just watched.”

What I could have added was, “Are you kidding? Printing for a third-generation printing family? Not me.”

I might be a little late to the party, but I’m not crazy.

Public Citizen

Cross Words

We had a fight the other night. Now, in 20 years of marriage, I’ll bet Mary and Shop Boy have had an average of one to two quarrels a year. It’s always over something stupid.

This time took the cake:

Scrabble.

And suddenly, Shop Boy needed a seven-letter word for “sorry but there’s a lot on my mind — my mom died five years ago this week and we just watched a play, Our Town, where our neighbors were the stars and the people of the cemetery are dealing with their lot and I’m wishing Mom wasn’t in the ground still and we worked a triple shift and the house is a wreck and I’ve no idea where the bills stand and we’re behind on menus and we’ve had a cocktail — did I mention I’m fat? — and it’s 1 a.m. and now you want to play Scrabble? I never liked Scrabble …”

Like I said, stupid.  Cue the Golf Channel’s British analyst:

“Badly done, Shop Boy. Badly done …”

Now Mary was mad — all she’d wanted was to physically play Scrabble, touching the wooden tiles for real after playing so much of the video version on her iPhone. She’s a killer, FYI, having scored seven “bingos” — clearing all your letter tiles for the win on the first play — in, like, 65 games against the computer. I always warn people against playing Mary in Scrabble for this reason. She goes all Rain Man on you, then does an end zone dance on your fallen figure. At least, that’s what she usually does.

But she could clearly tell Shop Boy was upset about something — OK, everything — and tried to help me, poor suffering word fool that I am, keep the game going while the X’s, Z’s, Q’s, P’s and frustration piled up on my tray.

“This game is stupid,” said I, “and I’ve always hated it because it’s stupid.”

Well.

An old golfing buddy of my dad’s, upon hearing that Shop Boy was getting hitched, offered a piece of advice for married couples that I’ve never forgotten. I’ll clean up the language a bit, but it’s essentially this: Never go to sleep back to back. You know, don’t let the anger linger into the next day. Kiss and make up before bedtime. It also helps if you have a tiny, tiny bed, as Mary and Shop Boy did in their apartment-dwelling days — it leaves no room for anger or bad feelings.

There’s no room for bad feelings in the printshop either, a notion that Shop Boy was testing pretty severely at the moment. See, Mary’s funny. She gets upset, lets it all out, and moves on. See it? Say it.

Shop Boy? You might not know it from reading this blog, but the “big lug” — Mom’s pet phrase — has trouble expressing his opinions and feelings sometimes. It usually goes like this: Something’s bugging me, so I think about it, and think about it, and the more I think about it, the more I think I shouldn’t think about that right now. So I try to bury it, and it tries to claw its way out. Mary doesn’t understand, naturally, and wants to help me reach inside and put a balm on whatever’s hurting in there. This has led to some fairly funny — in retrospect — standoffs.

Shop Boy: “I’m going to have to opt out of this conversation.”

Mary: “OK, then … tell me what’s wrong and the conversation’s over. Talk.”

Anyway, Mary and Shop Boy make a good team. Working silently on separate projects? Not so effective. So we made up, Shop Boy clumsily trying to explain why he was a jerk, and we moved on.

Besides, life’s way, way too short for pigheadedness. Ask my mom and her cronies at the cemetery. She’s been with them five years now. I sure hope they’re better company than the stiffs in Our Town.

Letterpress List No. 82: Rollin’ Again

So my little brush with crime and the loss of a beloved collection
of CDs got me to thinking, after a long hiatus, about music again.

Namely …

If you’d told Shop Boy 25 years ago that he’d have a favorite Pandora station built on ditties from country singers and jokey folkies — Kinky Friedman, Jerry Jeff Walker, John Prine, Willie Nelson(!) — I’d have told you to take a couple of aspirin and lie down, because you’re feverish, son.

Well, dropkick me through the goalposts of life, Jesus.

Maybe it’s a family thing. My sister Ellen, who converted to Judaism
and raised three kids — OK, and a husband — in the Jewish faith,
rides around Rhode Island in a minivan pumping country songs. Which is “wicked” weird only because of the location — ain’t no cowboys where Shop Boy comes from — and because every so often something country Christian comes on. And they’re grooving to it.

I mean, “Drugs or Jesus” by Tim McGraw? Mary about fell out of the vehicle. It sure did lighten the mood on our way to my mom’s funeral, though.

Now, Shop Boy’s not one to goof on anyone’s religion. Mom raised seven kids — OK, and a husband — in the Catholic Church and went to her grave in the comfort of knowing she was loved and saved. Us kids went our own ways, some finding comfort in various denominations and others not so much. We’re told we’re nice people.

And my brother-in-law Barry’s outlaw CD copy of McGraw’s album Live Like You Were Dying — with “Drugs or Jesus” on it — actually sat in Shop Boy’s truck a while.

It’s just funny sometimes how music often unconsciously becomes part of our fabric.

Take what was swiped from Shop Boy’s truck. (Or, in this case, give it back, whoever you are. Geez.) It reveals me as what I am: white middle-aged (I hope) New England-bred dude fiercely loyal to the music of his teens, twenties and thirties. So what in the world is Kanye West doing on my iPhone playlist. And why am I suddenly more fond of the “Urban Assault” version of Limp Bizkit’s “Rollin’” — with Redman, Method Man and that barking looney DMX — than the original. Young Jeezy? And perhaps even more unexpectedly, U2. I mean, all that chingalingy guitar drives me bonkers. But I love “Vertigo.”

The Doors? As music critic J.D. Considine once wrote of Courtney Love, “I don’t worship at that particular church.” But someday maybe Shop Boy will have recovered from his college roommate’s infatuation with all things Jim Morrison.

It’s why I try not to say things like, “Oh, I hate that band,” or “Oh, I hate that type of music.” And sure, maybe it’s Stockholm syndrome — you know, falling in love with the one who kidnapped you like Patty Hearst did. Mary does play this kind of stuff very loud all the time at the printshop. Maybe Shop Boy’s simply gone off his rocker.

It would kind of explain the letterpress thing.

See, at first Shop Boy indulged Mary while secretly considering every new printing press or furniture cabinet one more stupid thing to clean and every late night as one more cross to bear.

And now? Well, I still kick a bit over the late nights. But mostly I wish Shop Boy could spend more time with Mary in the printshop.

Yep, that clinches it: Stockholm syndrome.

Letterpress List No. 82

Rollin’ — Limp Bizkit (The old Shop Boy rolled more like this.)
No More Mr. Nice Guy — Alice Cooper (So easy a caveman can sing it. What was Geico thinking?)
Vertigo — U2 (All right, all right …)
Break on Through — the Doors (Nope. Still ain’t working for me.)
Gold Digger — Kanye West (Just sayin’.)
Drugs or Jesus — Tim McGraw ( ;-) )
Temptation — Diana Krall (A more sultry version of …)
Temptation — Tom Waits (Wait, I like this guy’s music? When did that happen? See what I mean?)
1996 — Marilyn Manson (He’s heading toward middle-aged-ish white guy now as well. Bet he’s screaming mad about that, too. “Anti-aging, anti-fat, get me Grecian formula stat! Anti-statins … now you’ve gone too far.”)
Que Onda Guero — Beck (Apparently L.A. barrio slang for “What’s up, white boy?” — and you can absolutely feel the street corner here. Great song. “See the vegetable man, in the vegetable van, with a horn that’s honking like a mariachi band …”)
Ain’t That a Shame — Cheap Trick (Yes it is — the theft, I mean.)
Ain’t That a Shame — Fats Domino (You decide. OK, no contest, but the Cheap Trick version went over very well at Budokan. The next three went over even better in my truck.)
Chop Suey! — System of a Down (“Why’d you leave the CDs in the truck cab/you wanted to …” Wake up, Shop Boy.)
Toxicity – System of a Down (Every SOD song has at least one “what the?” moment.)
Ddevil — System of a Down (This one’s got, like, six … including lead singer Serj Tankian unable to stifle a laugh at it all. Magic.)
She — Green Day (Turned out whoever broke in got the Green Day CD case, but not the CD, which was in the player. Shop Boy cheered!)
Song for the Dead — Queens of the Stone Age (Dave Grohl on drums! Shop Boy gets chills every time.)
AM Radio — Everclear (Had never heard of John Prine till Art Alexakis mentioned him in a song. Then came Google and … bam.)
Flag Decal — John Prine (Patriot.)
My President — Young Jeezy (Just … wow.)

System Outage

So, OK — Shop Boy was asking for it. They’d put graffiti on it, dumped trash in its bed, and still I’d leave the truck overnight at the factory building that houses Typecast Press. We leave the printshop so late many nights that taking two cars home seems dumb. Where are you going to park two cars at 2 in the morning in our driveway-less Baltimore neighborhood?

Still.

They got my System of a Down CDs. All of them.

(That sound you hear is Mary cheering.)

Again, asking for it …

But I’d sort of gotten overly familiar with the selections in my visor CD sleeve, and had loaded in a new bunch of CDs — in their covers — behind the seat for the great switcheroo. Then I didn’t quite get around to it.

And last night, a thief or thieves smashed the driver’s side window, rifled through the cab and found the stash — both in the visor and behind the seat. And there went Beck, Dire Straits (the Brothers in Arms album that Mary and Shop Boy fell in love to — I’ve got a second copy), Kiss Double Platinum, Cheap Trick at Budokan, Queens of the Stone Age, Tom Petty, Henry Rollins, Elvis Costello, Diana Krall, Foo Fighters, a two-CD set called Mullet Rock, Marilyn Manson, Green Day …

And all that wailing, banging and gnashing of teeth — Mary’s — that is System of a Down.

Thank goodness I’ve still got all those System albums on my iPod.

What Goes Around

After a good vacuuming and a bit of ancient nail and screw repair, Shop Boy eased the last heavy wooden tray drawer into the top rack of the mighty oak cabinet. Just like that, one more piece of old-time printing had officially come full circle.

Mary and Shop Boy? We’d already done that earlier in the day. Turnpike pikers, we’d naturally headed in the wrong direction on 695, Baltimore’s beltway. We’d been to the middle of nowhere out southwest of the city. Having picked up a heavy load, we planned to come back via the same fairly leisurely route of MD-97 to I-70 to I-695 to I-83 south. I-95 into the city is just so bouncy, crammed and rough, and a regular exit is now closed for … something or other. Who knows why? Everything’s old and wrecked in Baltimore.

About 45 minutes into the return trip, Shop Boy kind of sensed something was a bit off. I didn’t remember this part on the way out. But what do I know? I’m not the directions guy, and the truck was handling great, traffic wasn’t bad, my fellow drivers were being courteous enough, the load was solid, and …

“Where are we, Shop Boy?” Mary asked at last.

“Not sure … we passed Linthicum a little while back.”

Well, you should have seen the look she gave me.

Humph! Thankfully, in mentally backtracking, we quickly realized that the error — taking the long way around the beltway and adding miles and miles to the journey — had been a group effort. Each of us quickly apologized for not paying attention. Then we backtracked for real. We could still save a little time if we zigged, zagged and connected up with I-95. And what do you know — it wasn’t all that bad as I-95 goes.

Which, for us, was quite a switch. We don’t drive much on the highway. Hey, we were freeway commuters from Brooklyn to the Middle of Long Island for a couple of years. We’ve just sort of had enough of that, you know? And in Baltimore, we don’t need to, mostly. Hence Mary’s theory that the highway misses us and decides that when it does sees us, we ought to hang around a spell. I mean, does anybody else hit a traffic snarl at least one leg of every single road trip and commute?

Which is essentially why we stick with the train and tooling around broken but somehow lovable Baltimore. That is, unless Mary’s found another crazy press or old-and-wrecked must-have printshop thingy “conveniently located” in “nearby” Philly or whatever.

She had, and so we did … eventually get back to Baltimore with a huge cabinet in the back end of Shop Boy’s beloved little pickup.

The cabinet, which once would have supported an imposing stone or similar printshop work table, had ended up in a super scrounge-salvage place called Second Chance hard by Baltimore’s Pigtown neighborhood. (Honest.) There, it was spotted by a carpenter who admired the old workmanship enough that he got the idea of turning it into a funky kitchen island in his new home. Well, that was cool before the kids came. Then, the romance of the lead residue, splinters and doors and drawers that could trap little people quickly faded. So the cabinet — and the spanking new top he’d built — were on craigslist for a song. Mary’s pal Stacey Mink saw it, and knowing Mary’s penchant for acquiring weird stuff — and Shop Boy’s penchant for reacting poorly to same — sent a link with the message, “I hesitate to send this to you …”

Third chance, anyone? Oh, boy.

Truth is, the cabinet looked pretty boffo in the craigslist ad for it.

And even Shop Boy can feel good doing stuff like this, taking repurposed printing equipment and returning it to the wild of letterpress. Or bringing an old press back into useful service. Or finding old bits of printshop ephemera like a funky die-cutting block or old advertisement for a once famous brand to decorate our place or get put to back work. There’s somebody’s soul in everything you touch.

See, just the day before, in some other far-flung part of Maryland, we’d stood respectfully in the side wing of an old, three-generation printshop, helping to preside over the end of an era. Grandson David had decided to jettison anything just taking up space in favor of adding actual revenue-producing stuff. The old cabinets, turtles, dies and rules served him no useful purpose anymore. But he didn’t want it all to end up in the trash.

When in doubt, call Typecast.

Actually, Kyle from MICA had tipped us off to the stuff, having taken his fill for the burgeoning Corcoran letterpress program and a bit for himself.

Well, we’re as excited as anyone to get cheap or free old stuff, but this kind of operation makes you stop and think. I mean, the guy’s standing there as you pick through his family’s stuff, finding some of it indeed worthless. Ouch.

Mary’s great about insisting that whatever assembled diggers and movers show respect for what has come before us. You’re talking, in this case, about a business that has fed three generations. So respect means chatting up the proprietor, letting him or her know what respect we have for the craft and that the stuff is going to a good home. And it means being fair on pricing, by the way. You going to cheat a guy struggling to keep a printshop alive?

Good. I didn’t think so.

Besides, respect always, always, always pays off in some way. You meet an interesting guy, say. You show appreciation for his life’s work. Later, this guy tells that guy what you’re up to, and pretty soon you’ve got a line on more awesome stuff.

Or even better, you get the most valuable thing in the whole printshop.

David, for instance, has two Heidelberg windmills. Typecast Press has one, a beauty, but it’s been giving Mary fits in a couple of very specific areas that the manual doesn’t address. Real thick coaster stock makes it lose its mind, for instance. Mary asked David what he thought the problem was.

“C’mon, I’ll show you,” David said.

Ka-ching!

Games Over

With all eyes on Vancouver, it might have been easy to overlook an equally significant development in Baltimore:  the Typecast Press 2010 Sick-of-Winter Games.

There were thrills and, oh, yeah, there were spills. Let’s get right to the winners and losers. Starting with everyone’s favorite winter printshop event:

• CURLING — Involves getting dried-out and warped polymer plates to lay down flat and stick to the Boxcar base so the edges won’t catch the rollers and transfer ink to the wrong part of the paper, ruining the job. This one was no contest.

Mary — Gold medal (Scissors, X-acto, Press Wash Division)

Shop Boy — Disqualified for using too much tape, sloppily applied, which of course got gunked up with dried ink, peeled up, became type high and worsened the problem.

• SKELETON — In which participants tear open a printing press’s guts going after a phantom squeak with a can of oil.

Mary — Bronze (Sure, it was a Olympian effort, but one judge — OK, it was me — gave her exceptionally low marks for failing to execute a compulsory maneuver: leaving well enough alone. It’s Shop Boy’s signature move, and one he’s performed flawlessly for years, which had made him the heavy favorite in the eyes of Las Vegas oddsmakers and the vast majority of gamblers on the eve of the Games.)

Shop Boy — Disqualified when he runs screaming from the room (in the opposite direction of Mary and Las Vegas).

• FIGURE SKATING — Contestants attempt to lock up what’s in the  bed of a Vandercook (a big wooden 8, say) so nothing shimmies or “skates” around in the slightest.

Mary: Gold. In what can only be described as an upset, Mary unveils the House of Cards trick, a dazzling display of derring do that  produces a rickety stack of sticks that somehow holds. Fellow Baltimorean and event favorite Otto Mergenthaler drops dead at the sight, leaving Mary alone at the finish.

Shop Boy: Disqualified (whimpering in the corner).

• MOGULS — Contestants beat the bushes for enough steady work to keep them in expensive cotton paper, rusted, TLC-needy hulks of metal and perhaps, ahem, gin and tonics. Shop Gets off to a wicked start, blogging his heart out and sharing the follies of his labor to any and all who will read or listen, all in the name of getting the Typecast Press brand out there.

Mary: Gold. As the brains of the operation, she takes a more responsible approach, slowly building the business into a success, keeping Shop Boy out of the public eye by never letting him leave the shop.

Shop Boy: Disqualified for lack of blogging as he distractedly, and hopelessly, tries to prepare for the final event of the 2010 Typecast Press Sick-of-Winter Games:

• DOWNHILL — An endurance event in which one late night leads to a late start the next day, leading to a later night, leading to an earlier start to make up time, and so on and so on and so on … 2:30 a.m. … 3:15 a.m. … 4:30 a.m.!

Mary: Gold. She wins in a walk when Shop Boy no longer can.

Shop Boy: Disqualified. His Olympic dream ends with a slow-motion pan over a prone body face down  on a cot.

Starting Something

Come on … haven’t you ever wanted to know what it feels like to work with the mega-stars of this letterpress blog of ours? I mean, real face time? Printing your own stuff on a Vandercook press in a lovely setting? Learning a little about the history of printing and a lot about the oddities of starting a business whose technology peaked, like, 50 years ago? And getting the chance to maybe observe a Shop Boy “adventure” up close?

You sure have! Am I right, or am I right?

Well, you have come to the right place.

Yes, folks, if you order right now, you can be one of eight exceptionally fortunate people to be instructed by Mary in the first-ever, inaugural and even never-been-done-before Typecast Press letterpress class.

Dun-dun-daaaaaaaaah!

I mean, think of the collector’s items you’ll take away. And the bragging rights over being the first to take the class. Wow!

Mary, who you know teaches at the mighty Maryland Institute College of Art, has got the Vandercook presses primed and ready. Shop Boy has painted, vacuumed, stood atop a tall ladder and stretched up with a duster to, gulp, clean the ceiling fans, for heaven’s sake. (I’m never, ever doing that again, FYI, so the classroom environment will never be this dust-free again. Just saying.)

We’ve even hung up art and shelves in the new space, just for you.

And all you’ve got to do is show up. Heck, we’re even throwing in lunch.

Think about that for a minute. Fill up a boring February Saturday (2/20) with the love of letterpress.

Short notice? Sure.

But it’s short notice for us, too.

Shop Boy? Oh, I’ll be there. Signing autographs, posing for photos, that kind of thing. OK, I’ll mostly be trying not to do anything too dopey with all these witnesses around.

Seriously, I’ll be helping out with a joke here, or a little encouragement there, a floor demo over there — you know me — while Mary does the hard stuff.

Really, this should be fun. We’re going to do another, different workshop in March with our bookmaking friend BethAnne Garcia — ask her for a tip on the third race at Pimlico.

Kidding. We’ll teach you how to use the Vandercooks, she’ll teach you how to turn what you’ve printed into a keepsake book. She taught us, she can teach anybody. Registration for that’s on the form I linked to above as well.

Makes a great last-minute Valentine’s Day gift, if you, um, get me.

So, deal? Thought so. See everybody there.

Cleaning House

“Is the shop always this clean?” asked Jim Sherraden, the man responsible for — gulp — raising the famed Hatch Show Print in Nashville, Tenn., from the ashes.

Shop Boy was so flattered. A big-time letterpress celebrity, unprodded, voicing his approval of how we’ve put the shop together. I mean, Shop Boy tries to keep the place neat for those visitors who happen by Typecast Press and so that Mary will enjoy being there. Of course, on many late nights, Shop Boy wonders if he hasn’t done too good a job of that second part. But … wow.

Sherraden was at Typecast Press for a tour — seriously — during a Baltimore letterpress looksee that Mary had helped line up as part of The Man’s visit for a speech and demo at the Maryland Institute College of Art. And he was really cool about everything,  stuff like telling Mary which sets of wood type she’d collected were the real deal, adding with a twang and a wink that, naturally, the other sets weren’t exactly worthless in the right hands. What a down-to-earth, articulate, well-mannered fellow. (Shop Boy tried to watch his own manners and, um, articulation while Jim was there, with mixed success.)

Before leaving, he agreed to sign a copy of his book for Mary, and proceeded, with a ballpoint pen, to produce a full-page work of art reminiscent of the posters Hatch Show Print is famed for. You’d probably recognize his shop’s style. If not, you should check it out.

Anyway, Shop Boy tries to keep Jim’s visit in mind while surveying the wreck that is Typecast Press these days. Between moving all of the Vandercooks to the new space and cleaning out the old space by a January 1 deadline, stuff is everywhere, entire systems torn asunder. We’ve been in many printshops where stuff’s piled on top of stuff on top of stuff, and printers limbo over and around heaps of lead and paper as they move from press to press — and great work is produced nonetheless. But that ain’t us. We’re lucky we haven’t injured ourselves tripping over things in unaccustomed places.

Mary’s bummed. She’s eager to get things back to normal. Unfortunately, things are back to normal — goodbye, holidays — for the five-days-a-week commuter half of Shop Boy. That means it might be a couple of more weeks before all this stuff has got a permanent home and we can begin to memorize where it all is again.

Worth it? Oh, my, you betcha. Mary’s dad spent his holidays in the new space, painting sections of a room that through the years has acquired a funky color palette. You know, purple paint covering the acoustic tiles that begin about 16 feet above the black-tiled floor and extending across the ceiling 20 or so feet over our heads. Mocha-colored walls in the main area. An aggressively teal, L-shaped divider at the big room’s center. A lime green office off the main area. All cool colors on their own, no doubt. But we’d have had to leave the space every time we needed to do an ink color check — despite the bank of bright spotlights we inherited. So we figured we’d tone it down just a bit.

The teal divider became white with a red trim to match curtains we’d brought along. The mocha walls got the “Wayne Mashburn special”: three separate servings of joint compound to cover up any blemishes — in a few cases, pothole-sized — and subtle paint touch-ups to the point where you’d think the whole place had gotten a fresh coat. (This was despite the comedy routine of Wayne trying to pry the plastic lid off that drum of old paint the former tenant left in a closet. Shop Boy half expected the bucket to end up on his head.) And the lime green office has been similarly patched up and is now “Vail blue” or something. Subtle and lovely.

Then Wayne set to work building us the heavy-duty paper storage shelves of our dreams. Guy’s incredible.

As for “Shop Boy’s office” — aka the lunch area — Wayne ran out of time, leaving me to my own devices. When it comes to picking paint colors, Mary will tell you that this is rarely a good development, often ending in, um, unappetizing shades of whatever. Good thing I’ve been too busy to mess with it. The super-teal accent wall stays for now.

Meanwhile, Tom Beal, Mary’s machine whisperer brother-in-law, rewired the No.4 and SP-15 Vandercooks, discovering dangerous electrical wear-and-tear in one of them. Then he singlehandedly moved each 1,200-pound-plus press into final position (yikes!) and leveled each one.

Oh, and he hung the curtains.

What? You think that’s a bit sissy after throwing around thousands of pounds of metal? You weren’t watching Tom.

There he was, atop a 10-foot ladder, leaning toward the big, old industrial window glass and, power drill in left hand and monkey wrench in the right (for leverage to help push the drill since he was in such an awkward position), coaxing mounting screws slowly into the brick on the left side of the 10-foot by 10-foot bank of windows.

That manly enough for you?

No way Shop Boy’s doing that.

Besides, I was kissing the floor as “Low Boy” (in Wayne’s parlance). He’s about 6-foot-4 and Tom’s up there somewhere, too. I’m, uh, not. Meaning I’m the guy picked to worm my way behind the Vandercooks, shimmying along the tile to tape and then paint the floor-level trim.

To be fair, Tom’s at least as nimble as Shop Boy and has never been afraid of tight spaces or a physical challenge. But like I said, he was busy at the moment: one foot on the ladder, one knee atop a wall segment, bent at the waist, head cocked, wrench now in left hand, power drill in the right hand, coercing the right-side mount into position — it was like Cirque du Soleil or something. Swear to god.

Shop Boy might be a little nuts sometimes about keeping things tidy (at least at the printshop — ;-) ). But that’s clean crazy.

So Over It

It was always something with Raymond. Why the young Shop Boy ever believed a word that came out of that mouth remains beyond my comprehension. Yet time and again, there we’d be, Ray laughing his crazy head off as I tried to survive whatever ridiculous adventure or cruel embarrassment he’d led me into.

Take the time Ray convinced me that his parents had made extra room, and paid extra money, so that I could come along on a trip to New Hampshire. Never mind that I had a football game on the day his parents were “counting on me” to come along. Well, my coach was counting on me, too, and about threw me off the team — I’d been terrified to tell him, as he had until recently been an offensive lineman with the Green Bay Packers. Six-foot-four, maybe 280 pounds. Shop Boy never did make it out of his doghouse. Worse, he was on my newspaper route, so I’d have to see him every day. And hear him. Coach John had this dismissive, sneering, devastating toss-off line: “That’s all …”

Two little words that Shop Boy will never get out of his ears.

Nor will Shop Boy ever forget the look of surprise on the faces of Raymond’s parents as he showed up, packed for New Hampshire. Ray was an only child and wanted company for the trip. He just hadn’t told his parents that he’d made arrangements.

Mortifying, right?

Shop Boy turned to leave.

“No, no … please come with, Stee-vun,” said his mom, a large, lovely and charming Swedish woman who I ended up liking much more than I ever did Raymond. It became sort of mutual over time. She was fascinated by a little boy who was so achingly polite, so unlike her own, and would feed me crackers and lingonberry jam when Ray wasn’t watching. Her accent cracked me up. “Damn it, Raymond!” came out something like “Yemen, Ray-mown!”

If only I’d listened to her instead of Ray, a leap-before-you-look kind of kid. The opposite of little Shop Boy, which I guess makes sense. Shop Boy was the good kid, eager to please, who wished to be less afraid to try things.

It might also explain how I ended up in the cockpit of a Fokker triplane — the Red Baron’s ride — buzzing granite cliffs and doing stalls, dives, barrell rolls and loop-the-loops over Peterboro, N.H., if geographic memory serves. Ray had told the stunt pilot (!) on the sly that it was my first time flying, and the dude was thus out to make a memory for me. Mission accomplished. I was ill for a week.

And yet, Shop Boy relishes telling the tale.  Though I’d never want to go through it again, it’s sort of cool to have it in my past (so long as it stays there — ooh, shivers up my spine to this day).

I promised myself I would feel the same — in time — about the Squidfire Holiday Art Mart. This was to be the first official foray by Typecast Press into the land of the arts and crafts fair. And to say the prep was going poorly … well, let’s just say that at 3 a.m. on the morning of the big event, Shop Boy threatened to gnaw his own leg off to escape Mary’s clutches.

Hey, it broke the tension.

See, we still had packaging ideas to talk through as we gathered all the stuff that we’d need for the show. And Shop Boy’s brain was shutting down. Even Andy Snair, illustrator friend of Typecast Press and the genius behind the clever Type Faces series of letters we were to launch that day, had called it a night after a heroic two-day effort on the Vandercook SP-15. I’m telling you, without Andy … no Type Faces at the fair. Mary was at max capacity, and Shop Boy was toast.

That’s when I made my pledge to keep pushing, to be positive, to be strong, to be professional, to be friendly, even at 5 a.m., with load-in set for 8:30 at an arena across town …

And to be ready to make Mary pay, and pay, and pay like Raymond never did. How she talked me into this …

The fair? Oh, it went pretty great for first-timers. We sold a bunch of Andy’s letters, a few of Shop Boy’s signature coasters, some really cool letterpressed wine bags that we came up with, sachets by the score. We met a bunch of people, many of whom got to make their own coaster on the little Kelsey we’d — ugh! — brought along.

True story: It was a long walk to the car from the floor of Baltimore’s Du Burns Arena. And even a little Kelsey 5X8 gets real heavy if you carry it far enough. So Shop Boy had a plan: Carry one of the display cabinets halfway there, then do the same with the Kelsey, setting it atop the cabinet as a resting point.

If only I had shared the plan with Andy.

Shop Boy boosted the Kelsey, hands wrapped carefully around the legs so as not to damage any of the more sensitive parts of the little jewel of a press, and made my way from the arena floor to the long set of stairs to the main concourse. So far, so good.

Of course, a little girl, maybe 3 years old — and unattended — made her way directly into my path at the stairs’ base and began her agonizing … one step, stop, look around … next step, stop, look around … way up the stairs. There was nowhere to set down the press, and no way Shop Boy was going to risk hurting this little girl, so I stayed back, praying that some adult would come whisk her away so I could dash the rest of the way to the rest stop.

Nope.

Finally she turned away at the top of the stairs and Shop Boy made a break for it, only to spot Andy — he truly was an amazing help, folks — carting away the cabinet where I was to set the Kelsey.

“Andy!” I called. “ANDY!”

Too far away.

Panicked, Shop Boy looked around. There was a flimsy plastic chair. There were a bunch of bags filled with paper goods. Walls of glassed-in shelves with all manner of indoor soccer trophies and such. And zero flat surfaces that would hold any weight.

Somewhere, Raymond had to be laughing.

Shop Boy might have been, too, if it were someone else’s knees buckling, someone else’s shoulders shaking. There was only one choice. Get the thing, somehow, through two sets of glass doors and outside, where Mary and Andy might spot me and run to help.

The cold air helped clear Shop Boy’s head a bit, and I spotted the section of wall with a flat top down two short flights of wide cement steps. Andy and Mary had their hands full and their backs turned, so …

I set the Kelsey down — gently — with the kind of “uuh-uhh-hhhhnnnnnnnnnnnnnn-UH!” that could be heard for blocks.

“Oh my god. Did you carry that all the way?” Mary asked.

“That wasn’t the plan,” I said, my fast breaths sending shots of steam into the chill.

When Shop Boy filled them in — “Andy! ANDY!” — Andy quickly apologized, then started laughing. Mary joined him. What could I do? No harm to small children or small presses. And Shop Boy was more or less intact.

I laughed till I cried.

Today, a month down the road, Shop Boy’s glad we took part in the Squidfire sale, hoping against hope, of course, that we’d do it a little differently next time.

It gave us Andy’s Type Faces, so long on the drawing board, convinced us we could, with proper planning, bring the Kelsey along on such outings so people can try their hand at letterpress, and provided the confidence for us to launch our own line of fun products with their own Andy-drawn logo and everything. More on that later.

And, yemen, it certainly gave us a funny story to take home, without the week of stomach distress.